Re: Timing

On Wed, 4 Dec 2002 [email protected] wrote:

> Herman and Daniel, the considerations you have put forward are
> understandable and generally quite correct, I think. On the other
> hand, and that was the point I was trying to make, there might be
> situations when we need to work differently. For instance, people
> working with safety critical hard real-time distributed systems often
> claim "that using time to synchronize two or more activities" (or
> nodes) is required.

Maybe because they have not learned to use less primitive means? Maybe
because it is easier to talk about timing constraints instead of logical
constraints? Etc.

My experience with RTOS programmers is that they are very good at
(implicitly) translating their logical needs/requirements into the very
basic primitives that RTOSs offer: priorities and time.

Of course, time _is_ important, in all real-time systems. But I think a
system's performance should be judged on how well it satisfies _all_
constraints, and not just reduce everyhting to timing constraints or
priorities. And after all, timing events are just another sort of
events, so that an event-based framework also covers these peoples'
needs :-)

Herman

-- 
  K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480