The Design and Performance of the jRate Real-Time Java Implementation

Over 90 percent of all microprocessors are now used for realtime and embedded applications. Since the behavior of these applications is often constrained by the physical world, it is important to devise higher-level programming languages and middleware that robustly and productively enforce real-time constraints, as well as meeting conventional functional requirements. This paper provides two contributions to the study of programming languages and middleware for real-time and embedded applications. We first present how we are applying generative programming techniques to develop jRate, which is an open-source ahead-of-time-compiled implementation of the Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ). The goal of jRate is to provide developers the ability to generate RTSJ implementations that are customized for their needs. We then show performance results of jRate that illustrate how well it performs compared to the TimeSys RTSJ Reference Implementation (RI).