Mostly-Strongly-Timed Programming in LC

Due to its synchronous behaviour, a strongly-timed program can suffer from the temporary suspension of realtime DSP in the presence of a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose mostly-strongly-timed programming, which extends strongly-timed programming with the explicit switch between synchronous context and asynchronous context. If a thread is in asynchronous context, the underlying scheduler is allowed to preempt it without the explicit advance of logical time. Timeconsuming tasks can be executed asynchronously, without causing the temporary suspension of real-time DSP. We also discuss how the concept is integrated in LC, a new computer music programming language we prototyped, together with the discussion on implementation issues.