Extending the C++ language for hard real-time systems

The design and development of a hard real-time application is often a difficult and time-consuming task. We present a description of the hard real-time C++ language (HRTC++) for real-time programming, which incorporates timing constraints consistent with the object-oriented concepts. The concepts of temporal abstract classes and virtual temporal constraints extend the inheritance mechanism of the C++ language to accommodate these real-time domain features. This significantly adapts the benefits of inheritance directly to real-time development, drawing from the contributions that inheritance renders to the reuse and consistency of software development.