Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages

Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages

[andy]

For those of you who use "Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages"
by Burns and Wellings as a course text, the 2nd Edition is now
available in paperback.
(see http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/real-time/andy/RTSbook.html )

This second edition is the result of a substantial reworking of the original text. The major changes can
be summaries as follows: 

     All the Ada related work has been upgraded to focus solely on Ada95. 
     Modula-2 has been dropped as a major language of consideration. 
     The C language, with the POSIX standards, and some C++ material has been introduced. 
     The amount of scheduling material has been increased significantly. 
     The case strudy has been redone in the HRT-HOOD design method. 

The movement from Modula-2 to C was motivated by: the reduced impact of Modula-2, the
widespread use of C, the standardisation of the POSIX interfaces to give thread and real-time
facilities, space consideration that prevented both languages been covered. Although occam2 has
also not increased in popularity of the last 10 years its distinctive features means that is it still an
important language in this application domain. Since the first edition was published there has
been a substantial amount of research undertaken on fixed priority scheduling. A completely new
chapter (13) has therefore been added. This represents a comprehensive coverage of the resulting
response time analysis for priority-based real-time systems. We chose to re-engineer the case
study in the HRT-HOOD design method because this method was specifically developed to meet
the needs of hard real-time systems. Previously, we had used PAMELA. However, PAMELA is
not that well known and does not address schedulability analysis in its life cycle.