the swift programming language is my fault to some degree. mostly here to see dogs, shitpost, fix old computers, and/or talk about math and weird computer programming things. for effortposts check the #longpost pinned tag. asks are open.
Hey cohost, what's your favorite language, library, or DSL for specifying state machines?
Hierarchical State Machine support would be great, but Finite State Machines are cool too.
Bonus points if it has some way (internal or external tool) to visualize the state machine as well.
EXTRA bonus points if this tool/lang/DSL is already used for specifying a communication protocol, say: a client/server interaction.
edit: I'm happy with ANY language or tool, including GUIs, HDLs, etc.
the only one i've really used is ragel, which is pretty gud
I think I've heard about Ragel before, if you have any great examples to share (or guides/tutorials/references) beyond what I could find from their homepage, I'd appreciate it!
Do you have any links to docs or examples that would show me what a HSM/FSM would look like in prolog? I could naively google, but if you have any good examples, I'd appreciate it :)
I don't know if this is in the spirit of your post, but AWS's managed state machine product has a visualizer I've found pretty useful. (The definition language, unfortunately, is an absolute trash fire.)
Might be worth looking at Alloy. It's deeply weird, but it's also really powerful. I think you could probably do the job with it, depending on what you mean by 'specify'. It comes with a nice visualizer.
TLA+ probably goes without saying as well. That's what I've used for specifying protocols with FSM models at either end. I kind of hate it, but it's got a fair amount of mindshare for this kind of job. Hillel Wayne's book + site make it much easier to engage with.
Agree, Alloy is probably the non-plus-ultra when it comes to getting a grasp on state machines & weird states. TLA+ if there’s parallelism involved. The Alloy Book is a very good introduction, I should finish working through it.
I am still looking for an excuse to really get into P. iirc it's been used to synthesize USB drivers for Windows, among other things
this is semi-joking because it's for "specifying" FSMs without any regard to the actual implementation, but honestly it's really nice to draw them in La/TeX with tikz and this tool by Evan Wallace
