Timed C: An Extension to the C Programming Language for Real-Time Systems
Saranya Natarajan
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
SWS Colloquium
Saranya Natarajan is a third year PhD student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (EECS). She is pursuing her doctoral research under the guidance of David Broman. She received her master's degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2015. Her research interests span the areas of real-time systems, programming languages, and compilers
The design and implementation of real-time systems require that both the logical and the temporal behaviour are correct. There exist several specialized languages and tools that use the notion of logical time, as well as industrial strength languages such as Ada and RTJS that incorporate direct handling of real time. Although these languages and tools have shown to be good alternatives for safety-critical systems, most commodity real-time and embedded systems are today implemented in the standard C programming language. Such systems are typically targeting proprietary bare-metal
platforms, standard POSIX compliant platforms, or open-source operating systems. It is, however, error prone to develop large, reliable, and portable systems based on these APIs. In this talk, I will talk about an extension to the C programming language, called Timed C, with a minimal set of language primitives, and show how a retargetable source-to-source compiler can be used to compile and execute simple, expressive, and portable programs