Assessing the Overhead of Automatic Code Generation for a Component Approach Compared with Hand-Written Code: Experiments with the MyCCM Code Generation Tool Chain

This paper provides figures regarding the measured overhead induced by a component approach to design and automatically generate code. We focus on infrastructure code, i.e. Code that controls execution threads and communication libraries, and also that connects the components one with another. This technical code is typically complex to write, and corresponds to patterns that can be identified and automated. Therefore, the questions that arise are: in the scope of a hard real-time system, is the development speed gained by automatically generating this code worth the potential loss of performance at execution time? Does the use of a component framework alter the expected real-time properties, compared with hand-written code? This paper provides some elements of answer.