A comparison of OO and reactive based specifications on the design of embedded systems

The growing complexity of embedded systems has claimed more abstract approaches in order to apply some kind of system-level design methodology. Java is a natural candidate for system design language, due to its well known software compatibility and object-oriented features. On the other hand, reactive synchronous languages such as RS present several advantages to model specific domain applications, like embedded reactive real time systems. This paper presents an initial comparison of Java and RS that adopts different models of computation. The comparison has been made in terms of modeling facilities, simulation capability and synthesis results, obtained from the specification of some embedded systems.