The Skil Project

What is Skil?

Skil is an imperative, C-based language enhanced with a series of functional features. It aims to provide a high programming level, which allows the integration of algorithmic skeletons (Skil stands for Skeleton Imperative Language). At the same time, because of the base language, which is imperative, and because of the instantiation technique used in the Skil compiler to translate the functional features, Skil programs reach a higher performance than their functional counterparts, approaching the efficiency of direct C implementations. The main goals in the design of Skil were on the one hand to provide it with constructs supporting polymorphism, the definition and use of distributed data structures and higher-order functions, and on the other hand, to simplify the base language (C) by eliminating some of its redundancies and some of its features of lesser importance.

Give me more information

The enhancements, restrictions and grammar of Skil are given here.
Some papers on Skil and related topics can be found here.

An Skil example

Here are the headers of the skeletons working on distributed arrays that have been implemented so far.
Some examples of parallel Skil programs based on the array skeletons:

Download Skil

The Skil prototype version was debugged and extended by some C elements like const or enum.
Now you can include all header files from the C-Compiler instead of designing your own.

You can download the Skil-Compiler source or the pre-compiled executables for Linux (Kernel 2.2.x) or Windows.

Full source:	skil_src.1.01.tar.gz	(150kB)
Linux binary:	skil_linux.1.01.tar.gz	(240kB)
Win32 binary:	skil_win32.1.01.zip	(100kB)

Working on and with Skil

Currently the Skil compiler is in use for implementation of Algorithmic Skeletons for Parallel Adaptive Multigrid Methods by Thomas Richert. More information you will find on the Pamusk home page. Furthermore, Adriano Gaeta has debugged and improved the compiler. If you are interested in improving Skil, developing new features or intend to write a Master Thesis (Diplomarbeit) in this context, please contact me.