Function-Oriented Decomposition for Reactive Embedded Software

Abstract

Due to C's overwhelming dominance in industry, reactive embedded applications usually rely on conventional sequential programming. Adopted approaches favor event-driven paradigms which prevent function-oriented code decomposition in particular. This encourages the violation of fundamental software engineering principles. The reactive programming paradigm is proposed as a general solution. However, most reactive languages cannot keep up with C's practical advantages. It appears, that the subfamily of synchronous languages provides promising features but real-world deployments and evaluations are rarely reported in literature. On this account, we make two major contributions in this paper. First, we elaborate how the lack of function-oriented software decomposition manifests in a real-life industrial application. Second, we provide a corresponding re-implementation which illustrates the deployment and discusses the gained engineering benefits provided by the third-party, synchronous-reactive programming language Céu. We believe that our work generally reveals a practicable way of improving embedded software quality in industrial applications.