As embedded systems play an increasingly important role in lives, demand for technologies that can enhance the reliability of such systems will continue to grow. This talk examines why traditional high-level programming languages can be inappropriate for such applications, and introduces the idea of resource-aware programming (RAP) languages. RAP languages bridge the gap between traditional software engineering demands and embedded software development by 1) providing a very expressive macro system that allows arbitrary computations to be done on the development (or configuration) platform, 2) performing *all* type checking before macro expansion, even when macro-expansion depends on configuration-time inputs, and 3) using static typing to ensure that only resource-bounded computations remain after macro expansion. The talk presents recent results from our work in this area and introduces MetaOCaml Concoqtion, an extension of OCaml with indexed types.
Walid Taha is an assistant professor at Rice University, Houston, TX. He is the principal investigator on a number of NSF, Texas ATP, and SRC research grants and contracts on various aspects of resource aware programming. Taha is actively involved in development of both the embedded software and generative programming research communities.