John Regehr, Nathan Cooprider, Will Archer, and Eric Eide

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS) 2006.

DOI: 10.1145/1215995.1216001

© Copyright 2006 by ACM, Inc. Posted by permission of ACM; the copies posted here may not be redistributed. The definitive copy of this work is available from the ACM Digital Library.

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areas
Operating Systems, Languages, Mobile Networking

abstract

We report our experience in implementing type and memory safety in an efficient manner for sensor network nodes running TinyOS: tiny embedded systems running legacy, C-like code. A compiler for a safe language must often insert dynamic checks into the programs it produces; these generally make programs both larger and slower. In this paper, we describe our novel compiler toolchain, which uses a family of techniques to minimize or avoid these run-time costs. Our results show that safety can in fact be implemented cheaply on low-end 8-bit microcontrollers.