The Ravenscar profile for high-integrity Java programs?

Abstract

The Ravenscar Profile was a major output of the 8 th International Real-Time Ada Workshop. The profile defines a subset of the Ada95 tasking constructs that matches the requirements of Safety Critical, High Integrity and Hard Real-Time systems by eliminating constructs with high overhead or non-deterministic behavior (semantically or temporally) whilst retaining those elements that form the basic building blocks for constructing analyzable real-time systems.The recent explosion in interest and use of the Java™ platform for embedded devices has exposed basic flaws in the semantics of its real-time constructs, and this has led to initiatives to extend the language to address these weaknesses. Key personnel involved in the definition of the Real-Time Annex for Ada95 and the Ravenscar Profile also influenced the design of the real-time extensions to Java™, and so it is not surprising that these extensions follow closely the experiences learned from Ada.This paper describes the proposed set of extensions to Java™ to support real-time and high integrity systems, drawing parallels with the Ravenscar Profile definition. It suggests the possibility of co-existence and interoperability of Ravenscar-compliant Ada and RT-Java partitions within a high integrity or safety critical system.