Designing a low-level virtual machine for implementing real-time managed languages

Applications of real-time systems have grown significantly in both diversity and popularity, and the appetite for real-time software has never been higher. In contrast, the choice of programming languages used to develop such systems has stagnated, mostly limited to decades-old languages, specifically Ada and C/C++, and more recently real-time Java. We posit that the high cost and difficulty of developing new programming languages for real-time systems is the main reason for this mono-culture. To tackle the lack of diversity, we propose the design of a micro virtual machine on which managed programming languages for real-time systems can be developed. Our design facilitates bringing the advantages of correct managed languages to the real-time domain. We build on a previously published micro virtual machine specification, named Mu, and propose a set of modifications to its abstractions over concurrency and memory management to make it suitable for real-time systems. The resulting design is a basis for a new micro virtual machine specification we call RTMu, designed as a reliable and efficient foundation for the development of managed languages for real-time systems.