The Functional Paradigm in Embedded Real-Time Systems : A study in the problems and opportunities the functional programming paradigm entails to embedded real-time systems

Abstract: This thesis explores the possibility of the functional programming paradigm in the domain of hard embedded real-time systems. The implementation consists of re-implementing an already developed system that is written with the imperative and object oriented paradigms. The functional implementation of the system in question is compared with the original implementation and a study of code complexity, timing properties, CPU utilization and memory usage is performed. The implementation of this thesis consists of re-developing three of the periodic tasks of the original system and the whole development process is facilitated with the TDD development cycle. The programming language used in this thesis is C but with a functional approach to the problem. We conclusions of this thesis is that the functional implementation will give a more stable, reliable and readable system but some code volume, memory usage and CPU utilization overhead is present. The main benefit of using the functional paradigm in this type of system is the ability of using the TDD development cycle. The main con of this type of implementation is that it relies heavily on garbage collection due to the enforcement of data immutability. We find in conclusion that one can only use the functional paradigm if one has an over dimensioned system when it comes to hardware, mainly when it comes to memory size and CPU power. When developing small systems with scarce resources one should choose another paradigm.