A Language Support Environment for Complex Distributed Real-Time Applications

Engineering of complex distributed real-time applications is one of the hardest tasks faced by the software profession today. All aspects of the process, from design to implementation, are made more di cult by the interaction of behavioral and platform constraints. Providing tools for this task is likewise not without major challenges. In this paper, we discuss a tool suite at New Jersey Institute of Technology's Real-Time Computing Lab which supports the development of complex distributed real-time applications in a suitable high-level language (CRL). The suite's component tools include a compiler, a transformeroptimizer, an allocator-migrator, schedulability analyzers, a debugger-monitor, a kernel, and a (simulated) network manager. The overall engineering approach supported by the suite is to provide as simple and natural an integrated development paradigm as possible. The suite tools address complexity due to distribution, scheduling, allocation and other sources in an integrated manner (largely) transparent to the developer. To re ect the needs of propagation of functional and non-functional requirements throughout the development process, a number of robust code transThis work is supported in part by the U.S. ONR Grants N00014-92-J-1367 and N00014-93-1-1047, by the U.S. NSF Grant CCR-9402827, by the U.S. NSWC Grants N60921-94C-0106, N60921-94-M-1250, N60921-93-M-3095and N60921-93M-1912, and by the AT&T UEDP Grant 91-134. formation and communication mechanisms have been incorporated into the suite. To facilitate practical use of the suite, the developed programs compile-transform to a safe subset of C++ with appropriate libraries and runtime support.