Lean and Efficient System Software Product Lines: Where Aspects Beat Objects

Abstract

Software development in the domain of embedded and deeply embedded systems is dominated by cost pressure and extremely limited hardware resources. As a result, modern concepts for separation of concerns and software reuse are widely ignored, as developers worry about the thereby induced memory and performance overhead. Especially object-oriented programming (OOP) is still little in demand. For the development of highly configurable fine-grained system software product lines, however, separation of concerns (SoC) is a crucial property. As the overhead of object-orientation is not acceptable in this domain, we propose aspect-oriented programming (AOP) as an alternative. Compared to OOP, AOP makes it possible to reach similar or even better separation of concerns with significantly smaller memory footprints. In a case study for an embedded system product line the memory costs for SoC could be reduced from 148–236% to 2–10% by using AOP instead of OOP.KeywordsProduct LineSoftware Product LineWeather InformationExtra OverheadVirtual FunctionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.