Development of embedded software has for some years mainly been carried out by hardware-aware programming using the C-language, and in some cases even in assembly languages. This works well in simple cases when the application demands and the hardware are known at design time, and the size of the (statically defined) software is small. When applications increase in size and must be rapidly developed (time to market), and perhaps need to be on-line upgradeable, more programming support is needed. In particular, for critical applications (safety critical as in an airplane, mission critical as in space/military/nuclear tasks, economically critical if the survival of the company depends on the reliability of the computer system, etc.) special measures must be taken to limit the possible (faulty) influences of one software function on another part of the system. Therefore, we have to abandon programming in C or C++ for large/complex systems. Instead, we have to base the core development on …
