High-level programming of embedded hard real-time devices

While managed languages such as C# and Java have become quite popular in enterprise computing, they are still considered unsuitable for hard real-time systems. In particular, the presence of garbage collection has been a sore point for their acceptance for low-level system programming tasks. Real-time extensions to these languages have the dubious distinction of, at the same time, eschewing the benefits of high-level programming and failing to offer competitive performance. The goal of our research is to explore the limitations of high-level managed languages for real-time systems programming. To this end we target a real-world embedded platform, the LEON3 architecture running the RTEMS real-time operating system, and demonstrate the feasibility of writing garbage collected code in critical parts of embedded systems. We show that Java with a concurrent, real-time garbage collector, can have throughput close to that of C programs and comes within 10% in the worst observed case on realistic benchmark. We provide a detailed breakdown of the costs of Java features and their execution times and compare to real-time and throughput-optimized commercial Java virtual machines.