An experimental environment validating the suitability of CLI as an effective deployment format for embedded systems

Abstract

Software productivity for embedded systems is greatly limited by the fragmentation of platforms and associated development tools. Platform virtualization environments, like Java and Microsoft .NET, help alleviate the problem, but they are limited to host functionalities running on the system microcontroller. Due to the ever increasing demand for processing power, it is desirable to extend their benefits to the rest of the system. We present an experimental framework based on GCC that validates the choice of CLI as a suitable processor-independent deployment format. In particular, we illustrate our GCC port to CLI and we evaluate the generated bytecode in terms of code size and performance. We inject it back into GCC through a CLI front-end that we also illustrate, and we complete the compilation down to native code. We show that using CLI does not degrade performance. Compared to other CLI solutions, we offer a full development flow for the C language, generating a subset of pure CLI that does not require any virtual machine support other than a JIT compiler. It is therefore well suited for deeply embedded media processors running high performance media applications. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.