The Jazz home page

What is Jazz? Jazz is a high-level programming language for expressing, in a concise and accurate way, large digital synchronous circuits. From a language-designer perspective, Jazz is a declarative, single-assignment, higher-order, lazy, functional, and object-oriented language with parameterized types and multi-methods. Jazz is strongly-typed (with a type-system derived from ML-sub) and supports both the explicit and implicit declaration of variables and methods thanks to a powerful constraint-based type-inference algorithm. The syntax of Jazz and its object model are Java-like and should look familiar to any Java programmer.

Jazz is currently being implemented by Alexandre Frey in cooperation with Gérard Berry, Patrice Bertin, and François Bourdoncle (CMA, École des Mines de Paris), and Jean Vuillemin (DMI, École Normale Supérieure).

Important notice: the language is not finalized yet, and lacks any form of documentation. Try it at your own risks!

Useful Jazz links

• Download the Jazz distribution
• Describing circuits in Jazz (currently out of date)
• Overview of Jazz

Sample Jazz programs
(use the links in the source code to navigate)

• Fibonacci numbers
(program output)
• Using arrays in Jazz
(program output)
• Generic linked lists (program output)
• Step-by-step interpreter of polymorphic user-defined expressions (program output)
• Binary Decision Diagrams (program output)
• 7-segments decoder (program output)
• Compilation of Pure Esterel programs into circuits (simple.strl, program output, simulation)
• Instanciation of circuits on streams (program output)

Useful packages

• The standard jazz.lang package accessible by all programs.

• The jazz.util package containing various utility classes.

• The jazz.io package for performing input/output operations.

• The jazz.unsafe package containing classes and methods with side-effects allowing package implementors to write efficient code.

• The jazz.circuit package for creating circuits.

• The jazz.circuit.pam package for creating circuits on PAMs and Pamettes using the PamDC library.

• The jazz.circuit.bdd package for creating and manipulating Binary Decision Diagrams.

• The jazz.circuit.expr package allowing the symbolic manipulation of circuits and the algorithmic generation of circuits in an imperative way.

• The jazz.circuit.esterel package allowing the parsing of Pure Esterel programs and their compilation into circuits as defined in A Hardware Implementation of Pure Esterel G. Berry. Sadhana, Academy Proceedings in Engineering Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences, vol. 17, part 1 (1992) 95-130.

Acknowledgements

The Jazz system is written in Java and is compiled using the TowerJ compiler from