Developing embedded multi-threaded applications with CATAPULTS, a domain-specific language for generating thread schedulers

This paper describes CATAPULTS, a domain-specific lan-guage for creating and testing application-specific user level thread schedulers. Using a domain-specific language to write thread schedulers provides three advantages. First, it mod-ularizes the thread scheduler, making it easy to plug in and experiment with different schedulers. Second, using a domain-specific language for scheduling code helps pre-vent several of the common programming mistakes that are easy to make when programming in low-level C or assembly. Finally, the CATAPULTS translator has multiple backends that generate code for different languages and libraries. This makes it easy to prototype an embedded application on a regular PC, and then develop the final version on the em-bedded hardware; the CATAPULTS translator will take care of generating the appropriate code for both the PC proto-type and the final embedded version of the program. Using our implementation of CATAPULTS for Z-World’s embed-ded Rabbit processors, we obtained a performance gain of about 12.6 % at the expense of about 12.7 % increase in code size for a fairly typical embedded application