Benefits of Type Inference for an ObjectOriented Real-Time Language

RealTimeTalk is a framework and an object-oriented language for distributed hard real-time systems. This paper presents past, present, and future work in the RealTimeTalk project. It concentrates on the lan-guage and programming part of RealTimeTalk, and the problems a dynamically typed language impose on a real-time system. We look at how some of these problems can be solved by type inference and how type information can assist the compiler in accepting larger classes of real-time programs, generate more efficient and deter-ministic code, provide better estimation of execution times, and avoid run-time type errors. With type in-ference, one can have the best of two worlds — effi-ciency and type safety, without the need for manual type declarations. An example is used to illustrate these ideas.