Efficient Type and Memory Safety for Tiny Embedded Systems

In Proceedings of the PLOS 2006 Workshop on Linguistic Support for Modern Operating Systems, San Jose, California, October 2006.

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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.