KESO: An open-source multi-jvm for deeply embedded systems

Java still is a rather exotic language in the field of real-time and particularly embedded systems, though it could provide productivity and especially safety and dependability benefits over the dominating language C. The reasons for the lack of acceptance of Java in the embedded world are the high re-source consumption caused by the Java runtime environment and lacking language features for low-level programming. KESO is a JVM under LGPL license that was specifically designed for the domain of statically-configured deeply em-bedded systems. KESO provides a sensible selection of Java features useful to the majority of embedded applications and safe and convenient constructs for low-level programming in Java. A key feature of KESO is its Multi-JVM archi-tecture, which allows the isolated cohabitation of different applications on one hardware platform. The resource consumption of applications developed on the base of KESO is comparable to C applications, and its mechanisms for communicating among isolated components are efficient and encourage the actual utilization of spatial isolation