Towards hard real-time erlang

Abstract

In the last decades faster and more powerful computers made possible to seriously take into account high-level and functional programming languages also for non-academic projects. Haskell, Erlang, O'CAML have been effectively exploited in many application fields, demonstrating how high-level languages can help in writing efficient, readable and almost bug-free code, rapidly stealing the prominent position gained in many fields by OO languages such as Java and C++. One of the fields where low-level imperative languages are still preferred to functional programming is that of hard real-time applications, since usually programmers (and managers) think that high-level languages are really not able to cope with the complex and critical requirements of real-time. In this paper we propose an implementation of a hard real-time scheduler entirely written in Erlang, and perfectly integrated with the Erlang BEAM emulator. Performance analysis show that the proposed solution is effective, precise and efficient, while remaining really simple to use as expected by Erlang programmers.