A survey of real-time capabilities in functional languages and compilers

Functional programming languages play an important role in the development of correct software systems. As embedded devices become pervasive and perform critical tasks in our lives, their reliability becomes paramount. This presents a natural opportunity to explore the application of functional programming languages to systems that demand highly predictable behavior. In this paper, we explore existing functional programming language compilers and their applicability to real-time embedded systems. We do this by defining important characteristics needed by a real-time programming language and survey how well existing languages meet these characteristics. We conduct empirical analysis of language runtimes in order to assess the impact of dynamic memory management on predictability and performance. Lastly, we review different programming models for expressing real-time considerations in applications.