Performance concerns of polymorphism in modelling domain variability in real-time systems

Abstract

Many organisations avoid using polymorphism to model variability in real-time system design. One concern is that the performance of polymorphic function calls is too slow. In this paper we describe an experiment that compares the performance of an instrument control unit module implemented using three different techniques. We compare a structured decision tree solution against both static and dynamic polymorphic solutions. Our results show that polymorphic solutions outperform the structured decision tree solution.