Advanced Communication and Networking

Abstract

When programming resource-scarce embedded smart devices the designer requires both the low-level system programming features of a language such as C and higher level capability typical of a language like Java. The choice of a particular language often implies trade offs between conflicting design goals such as performance, costs, time-to-market, and overheads. The large variety of languages, virtual machines, and translators provides the designer with a dense trade off space, ranging from minimalistic to rich full-fledged approaches, but once a choice is made it is often difficult and tricky for the designer to revise it. In this work we propose a different approach based on the principles of language-oriented programming. A system of light-weighted and modular extensions is proposed as a method to adaptively reshape the target programming language as needed, adding only those application layer features that match the current design goals. By doing so complexity is made transparent, but not hidden: While the programmer can benefit from higher level constructs, the designer and the deployer can deal with modular building blocks each characterized by a certain algorithmic complexity and therefore each accountable for a given share of the overhead. As a result the designer is provided with finer control on the amount of computing resources that are consumed by the run-time executive of the chosen programming language. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.