Using SIGNAL allows one to specify[4] an application, to design an architecture, to refine detailed components down to RTOS[clarification needed] or hardware description.
SIGNAL has been mainly developed in INRIA Espresso team since the 1980s, at the same time as similar programming languages, Esterel and Lustre.
It has been proposed to answer the demand of new domain-specific language for the design of signal processing applications, adopting a dataflow and block-diagram style with array and sliding window operators.
Le Goff, the abstraction and separate compilation formalized by O. Maffeïs, and the implementation of distributed programs developed by P. Aubry.
The Polychrony toolset is an open-source development environment for critical/embedded systems based on SIGNAL, a real-time polychronous dataflow language.