Synchronous languages first appeared during the 80’s, in order to provide a mathematical model for safety-critical systems. In this model, time is discrete. At each instant, all components of the system simultaneously receive and produce some data. This model allows simpler reasonning on the behaviour of the system, as it does not involve the time required for each of the operations for every component. In safety-critical systems, safety is the rule, so a poor performance behaviour can be allowed if it improves safety. In order to improve safety, rather than conceiving directly the system, machines are used to automatically design the system from a given concise description. In the case of software, this machine is called a compiler, and avoids issues due to some human inadvertence. But it does not ensure that the produced system and the description specification really show the same behaviour. Some recent work from an INRIA team lead by Xavier Leroy achieved in 2008 the realisation of the CompCert compiler from a large subset of C to PowerPC assembly, for which it was proven inside of the Coq proof assistant that the produced system fits its source description. Such a compiler offers strong guarantees that the produced system and its given description by the programmer really fit. Furthermore, most current compiler’s optimizations are disabled when dealing with safety-critical systems in order to avoid tedious compilation errors that optimizations may introduce. Proofs for optimizations may allow their use in this domain without affecting the faith we could place in the compiler. The aim of this thesis is to follow a similar path, but this one on a language which would be more suited for safety-critical systems than the C programming language. Some dataflow synchronous programming language very similar to Lustre, called Ls is described with its formal semantics, as well as an imperative programming language similar to a subset of C called Obc. Furthermore some compilation process is described as well as some proofs that the semantics is preserved during the compilation process.
