Using C language extensions for developing embedded software

A case study

Conference paper (2015)

Authors

M Völter Itemis AG
A. van Deursen Software Technology
Bernd Kolb Itemis AG
Stephan Eberle Itemis AG
Department
Software Technology
Copyright: © 2015 M Völter, A. van Deursen, Bernd Kolb, Stephan Eberle
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2814270.2814276
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Published Date

2015

Language

English

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Department

Software Technology

Abstract

We report on an industrial case study on developing the embedded software for a smart meter using the C programming language and domain-specific extensions of C such as components, physical units, state machines, registers and interrupts. We find that the extensions help significantly with managing the complexity of the software. They improve testability mainly by supporting hardware-independent testing, as illustrated by low integration efforts. The extensions also do not incur significant overhead regarding memory consumption and performance. Our case study relies on mbeddr, an extensible version of C. mbeddr, in turn, builds on the MPS language workbench which supports modular extension of languages and IDEs.