An Approach to Tailoring the Ada Runtime Environment

Abstract

This study is an investigation of Run Time Environment tailoring. It attempts to answer the following questions: (1) What is tailoring?; (2) How can one determine whether an RTE can be tailored?; (3) What can one do to tailor an RTE?; (4) What are the possible side effects of tailoring?; (5) What are the costs of tailoring?; and (6) What can vendors do to make RTEs more tailorable? To a limited extent, the performance of Ada programs can be improved by techniques other than changing the code of the RTE. This research, however, specifically addresses tailoring the code of the RTE to improve the performance or functionality of Ada executables. This effort is also targeted at real-time systems that are to be embedded in bare computers where both the application and executive services are implemented through Ada constructs and the RTE. This research is not intended to establish direction for changes to a future Ada standard. It is intended to suggest near-term software engineering practices that conform to the Ada standard and can be applied when it is necessary to tailor the Ada RTE for highly constrained applications. It is also hoped that vendors will use this research to provide design features in Ada compilers that make it straightforward to employ these practices.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 15, 1989
Accession Number
ADA223147

Entities

Organizations

  • IIT Research Institute

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Application Software
  • Compilers
  • Computer Program Documentation
  • Computer Program Reliability
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Debugging
  • Embedded Systems
  • High Level Languages
  • Instruction Set Architecture
  • Machine Languages
  • Object Code
  • Procedures (Computers)
  • Software Development
  • Software Testing

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Nanocomposite Materials Science
  • Software Verification and Validation.