Object-orientation and C: Friends or foes?

摘要

Object orientation has been a widely-used technique in the toolbox of software developers for many years. Object orientation, as well as visual modeling, is used to improve the efficiency, quality, maintainability and success rate of software development projects. However, these concepts have yet to be widely applied in the embedded world, for reasons of size, complexity, and language. Embedded projects are often smaller in code size, as well as less complex, and C remains the preferred language for embedded systems engineers. The size and complexity of embedded projects have steadily increased while time-to-market windows have decreased. Project managers are struggling to keep their projects on plan, and developers are struggling to understand the applications they are building. Therefore, new approaches to creating embedded software are needed. Visual modeling and object orientation are proven ways to deal with this scale increase, but have been avoided because of perceived costs in size and speed.