Choosing Appropriate Programming Language to Implement Software for Real-Time Resource- Constrained Embedded Systems

ion and offers a better O-O programming style, but some of its features may cause degradation in program efficiency (Barr, 1999). Also, such a new generation O-O language is not readily available for the small embedded systems, primarily because of the overheads inherent in the O-O approach, e.g. CPU-time overhead (Pont, 2003). Despite that Ada was a leading language that provided full support for concurrent and realtime programming, it has not gained much popularity (Brosgol, 2003) and has rarely been used outside the areas related to defense and aerospace applications (Barr, 1999; Ciocarlie & Simon, 2007). Unlike C, not many programmers nowadays are experienced in Ada, therefore only a small number of embedded systems are currently developed using this language (Ciocarlie & Simon, 2007). In addition, despite their approved efficiency, Ada compilers are not widely available for small embedded microcontrollers and usually need hard work to accept the program; especially by new programmers (Dewar, 2006). Indeed, both Ada and C++ have too large demand on low-cost embedded systems resources (e.g. memory requirements) and therefore cannot be suitable languages for such applications1 (Walls, 2005). 1 However, despite the indicated limitations of Ada, there has been a great deal of work on assessing a new version of Ada language (i.e. Ada-2005) to widen its application domain (see Burns, 2006; Taft et al., 2007). It has been noted that Ada-2005 can have the potential to overwhelm the use of “C” and its descendants in embedded systems programming (Brosgol and Ruiz, 2007).