OBJECT ORIENTATION PROBLEMS WHEN APPLIED TO THE EMBEDDED SYSTEMS DOMAIN

摘要

Software is more and more becoming the major cost factor for embedded devices. Nowadays, with the growing complexity of embedded systems, it is necessary to use techniques and methodologies that in the same time increase the software productivity and can manipulate the embedded systems constraints like memory footprint, real-time behavior, power dissipation and so on. Object-oriented modeling and design is a widely-know methodology in software engineering. This paradigm may satisfy the software portability and maintainability requirements, but it presents an overhead in terms of memory, performance and code size. This paper presents some experimental results that shown that, for some OO applications, more than 50% of the execution time is taken just for the memory management. This is a huge overhead that cannot be paid by many embedded systems. This way, this paper shows experimental results and indicates a solution of this problem in order to reduce execution time, while maintaining memory costs as low as possible.