Green Hills Software has made the DO-178B Level A certifiable Embedded C++ (EC++) available for its safety-critical INTEGRITY-178B RTOS. The company claims it is the first to offer safety critical developers a choice of C, C++ and Ada, all developed and supported by a single vendor and integrated into a single, multiple language development environment – MULTI. Green Hills Software also supports specialised versions of these languages for safety critical development including MISRA C, Embedded C++, SPARK Ada and Ravenscar Ada.
Multiple applications can be developed in different languages and deployed in separate INTEGRITY-178B partitions running on the same computer. A high-integrity DO-178B Level A application might be developed using EC++ while an application with lower criticality might be developed using full Ada and deployed in its own separate partition.
With EC++, object oriented programming capabilities benefit from improved efficiency over full ANSI C++. EC++ removes ANSI C++ features that are not typically used in embedded or safety critical systems development, thereby generating much smaller and faster programs. EC++ improvements range from 30-50% in code size and run-time efficiency over full ANSI C++.