HW22: Chapter 21

21.4 Explain why an object-oriented approach to software development may not be suitable for real-time systems

Typically lower level languages are used because they are more efficient with the code they generate which is important to execution time when dealing with real-time systems.  Execution time needs to be fast in order for the responses to be meaningful from a real-time system as these are based on a stimulus-response model.  Languages like Java involve data-hiding representations and accessing attribute values through operations defined with the object which lead to significant performance overhead in OO systems.  Implementations in C are still preferred these days until Java can develop less resource hungry code.