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SCChartsan interactive guide

Further reading

The KIELER documentation, the papers and theses behind SCCharts, and the languages it is related to, each with a line on what you will find there.

This guide teaches SCCharts as KIELER implements it today. The sources below give the full story: the original documentation, the research papers that define the language and its compiler, and the languages SCCharts grew out of or sits next to. The links were last checked in October 2026.

Where to start. For the syntax, the KIELER wiki’s Syntax page, read next to this guide’s cheat sheet. For the ideas behind the language, the PLDI 2014 paper SCCharts: Sequentially Constructive Statecharts for Safety-Critical Applications: it is short, readable, and explains why SCCharts is built the way it is.

How hard is it? The documentation and the tools are written for users. The papers are research papers: each entry below says whether you can read it with this guide behind you (readable), or whether it assumes a background in formal semantics (formal); the thesis is a long reference to dip into. Where a paper has a DOI, it is given as well: the DOI keeps working if the university’s download links move. For how this guide checks its own claims, see How this guide is checked.

KIELER’s documentation

Section titled “KIELER’s documentation”
  • KIELER semantics wiki: the official documentation of SCCharts and the KIELER tools, maintained with the source code.
  • Syntax: the reference for the textual syntax, construct by construct, with KIELER’s diagram of each example. Brief, and in a few places out of date: for example, it says that strong aborts skip exit actions, but in KIELER’s compiler they run. This guide points out such differences where they matter.
  • Quick Start Guide: a first chart (ABRO) in KIELER’s Eclipse application, with screenshots of each step: modelling, compiling, and simulating with the simulation view.
  • VS Code Extensions: installing and using KIELER VS Code: opening the diagram, compiling, and simulating with the simulation view, its controls and trace export, with an annotated screenshot.
  • Syntax: Annotations and Pragmas: every annotation and pragma that changes the diagram or the compilation.
  • Syntax: Dataflow: dataflow regions, equations, instances of other charts and their diagrams.
  • Syntax: Timed Automata: clocks, deltaT, sleepT, period and the timing annotations. It says @HardReset is the default for period; in KIELER’s compiler soft reset is.
  • Syntax: Hostcode: host code, extern and the #hostcode pragmas.
  • Syntax: Object Orientation: classes, methods, inheritance and policies.
  • KIELER semantics on GitHub: the source code of the compiler, the simulator and the grammar. The grammar files (SCTX.xtext, KExpressions.xtext) are the final word on what the syntax allows.
  • KIELER on GitHub: every repository of the KIELER project, which Kiel University’s Real-Time and Embedded Systems group (page in German) runs.

Tools

Section titled “Tools”
  • SCCharts Lab: the VS Code extension this guide recommends, with diagrams, a tick-by-tick simulator and live diagnostics. Source code on GitHub.
  • KIELER VS Code: KIELER’s own VS Code extension, on the Open VSX registry.

Getting SCCharts compares the two.

SCCharts papers

Section titled “SCCharts papers”

Background

Section titled “Background”
Section titled “Related languages”

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