The development and maintenance of real-time systems has always been problematic. In most real-time and embedded systems, software development usually employs ad-hoc methods, utilizing assembly or machine specific languages.
Research on various algorithmic means for providing real-time program behaviour has been in existence since the 70's. Over the past two decades, real-time scheduling algorithms have gained tremendous popularity and maturity. However, a convenient means of utilizing such algorithms has lagged behind, given in part to the lack of a popular and flexible real-time programming language.
Though various real-time programming languages exist, such languages usually offer little with regard to flexibility in controlling the underlying real-time scheduling algorithm. μC++ has been extended into a flexible programming language suitable for real-time program development.