What is "esterel"

Esterel is a synchronous programming language for the development of complex reactive systems. The imperative programming style of Esterel allows the simple expression of parallelism and preemption. As a consequence, it is well suited for control-dominated model designs.

The development of the language started in the early 1980s, and was mainly carried out by a team of Ecole des Mines de Paris and INRIA led by Gérard Berry. Current compilers take Esterel programs and generate C code or hardware (RTL) implementations ( VHDL or Verilog).

The language is still under development, with several compilers out. The commercial version of Esterel is the development environment Esterel Studio. The company that commercialize it ( Synfora) initiated a normalization process with the IEEE in April 2007 however the working group (P1778) dissolved March 2011. The Esterel v7 Reference Manual Version v7 30 – initial IEEE standardization proposal is publicly available.

Estérel may refer to:

• Estérel, Quebec, a city
• Massif de l'Esterel, a mountain range in France