Python on an Real-Time Operation System (RTOS)

Question

I am planning to implement a small-scale data acquisition system on an RTOS platform. (Either on a QNX or an RT-Linux system.)

As far as I know, these jobs are perfo

Answer 1

Our team have done some work combining multiple languages on QNX and had quite a lot of success with the approach. Using python can have a big impact on productivity, and tools like SWIG and ctypes make it really easy to optimize code and combine features from the different languages.

However, if you're writing anything time critical, it should almost certainly be written in c. Doing this means you avoid the implicit costs of an interpreted langauge like the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock), and contention on many small memory allocations. Both of these things can have a big impact on how your application performs.

Also python on QNX tends not to be 100% compatible with other distributions (ie/ there are sometimes modules missing).