article

Virgil: objects on the head of a pin

Author:

Ben L. TitzerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 41, Issue 10

Pages 191 - 208

https://doi.org/10.1145/1167515.1167489

Published: 16 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Embedded microcontrollers are becoming increasingly prolific, serving as the primary or auxiliary processor in products and research systems from microwaves to sensor networks. Microcontrollers represent perhaps the most severely resource-constrained embedded processors, often with as little as a few bytes of memory and a few kilobytes of code space. Language and compiler technology has so far been unable to bring the benefits of modern object-oriented languages to such processors. In this paper, I will present the design and implementation of Virgil, a lightweight object-oriented language designed with careful consideration for resource-limited domains. Virgil explicitly separates initialization time from runtime, allowing an application to build complex data structures during compilation and then run directly on the bare hardware without a virtual machine or any language runtime. This separation allows the entire program heap to be available at compile time and enables three new data-sensitive optimizations: reachable members analysis, reference compression, and ROM-ization. Experi-mental results demonstrate that Virgil is well suited for writing microcontroller programs, with five demonstrative applications fitting in less than 256 bytes of RAM with fewer than 50 bytes of metadata. Further results show that the optimizations presented in this paper reduced code size between 20% and 80% and RAM size by as much as 75%.

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Cited By

Kozak DJovanovic VStancu CVojnar TWimmer CBruno RMoss E(2023)Comparing Rapid Type Analysis with Points-To Analysis in GraalVM Native ImageProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3617651.3622980(129-142)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
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Index Terms

Virgil: objects on the head of a pin
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Dynamic compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Classes and objects
        Inheritance
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 41, Issue 10

Proceedings of the 2006 OOPSLA Conference

October 2006

480 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1167515

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '06: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
October 2006
514 pages
ISBN:1595933484
DOI:10.1145/1167473
General Chair:
Peri Tarr
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA
,
Program Chairs:
William R. Cook
University of Texas at Austin, USA
,
Robert Biddle
Carleton University, Canada
,
Richard P. Gabriel
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 October 2006

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 41, Issue 10

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617651.3622980
Hasanagić MFabbri TLarsen PBandur VTran-Jørgensen POuy J(2019)Code generation for distributed embedded systems with VDM-RTDesign Automation for Embedded Systems10.1007/s10617-019-09227-0Online publication date: 19-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10617-019-09227-0
Sant'Anna FRodriguez NIerusalimschy RLandsiedel OTsigas PPetrioli CCox LWhitehouse K(2013)Safe system-level concurrency on resource-constrained nodesProceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/2517351.2517360(1-14)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517351.2517360
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