Towards Resource Consumption-Aware Programming

In order to check the fulfilment of non-functional requirements at an early system design and development stage, we provide a framework that facilitates the combination of platform-independent and platform-specific information in a query-based manner to calculate estimates for the resource consumption of the software under investigation at fine grained levels of code. Based on an already optimised intermediate representation of the source code, using a testing infrastructure for C code, we count the occurrence of instructions during program executions in a platform-independent manner. These instruction counters can be determined at program or function level. By combining these counters with cost information of a hardware platform we can provide resource consumption estimates. This allows the software developer to tailor the code steadily towards the non-functional characteristics of the software.