The Semantic Layers of Timber

We present a three-layered semantics of Timber, a language designed for programming real-time systems in a reactive, object-oriented style. The innermost layer amounts to a traditional deterministic, pure, functional language, around which we formulate a middle layer of concurrent objects, in terms of a monadic transition semantics. The outermost layer, where the language is married to deadline-driven scheduling theory, is where we define message ordering and CPU allocation to actions. Our main contributions are a formalized notion of a time-constrained reaction, and a demonstration of how scheduling theory, process calculii, and the lambda calculus can be jointly applied to obtain a direct and succinct semantics of a complex, real-world programming language with well-defined real-time behavior.