A Language for Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems

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2016-05

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University of Hawaii at Manoa

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As computers continue to advance, they are becoming more capable of sensing, interacting, and communicating with both the physical and cyber world in significant ways. Medical devices responsible for a person’s well-being, electronic braking systems in automotive applications, and industrial control systems are examples of the many Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that utilize these computing capabilities. Given the potential consequences of software related failures in such systems, a high degree of safety, security, and reliability is often required. Programming languages are one of the primary tools used by programmers to develop embedded and cyber-physical systems. They provide a programmer with the ability to transform complex designs into machine executable code. Of equal importance is their ability to help detect and avoid programming mistakes. For decades, embedded and cyber-physical systems have been developed predominantly with the C programming language—in large part, due to its expressive power and ability to program low-level characteristics of these systems that other languages can’t. Although a powerful and widely used language, its type and memory unsafe pointers are a common source of programming errors. Pretzel is a hypothetical programming language that addresses memory safety and type safety issues commonly found in C/C++ pointers while attempting to maintain comparable performance and expressiveness. To achieve this, Pretzel’s type system provides a cohesive set of three distinct reference types; each with varying degrees of flexibility and runtime overhead. Additionally, the design also proposes techniques to minimize the performance impact of automatic reference counting.

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programming languages, embedded systems, memory management, compilers

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Theses for the degree of Master of Science (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Computer Science

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