RTOS Application Development Redefined: Desktop-like Ease-of-Use in Embedded with LLVM and Boost

Nearly four decades ago VxWorks revolutionized the RTOS market by enabling a hardware board to connect to a Unix workstation dramatically changing the edit/compile/debug paradigm. This revolution was so disruptive that within ten years many established competitors went out of business or were acquired as a way to be salvaged.

With VxWorks, Wind River continues to disrupt and significantly contribute to making application development simpler, reliable and affordable. Our commitment to RTOS innovation enables the embedded industry to design, develop, and deploy generation after generation the safest, most secure devices in the world. And our efforts don’t go unnoticed as we’ve consistently been recognized as the commercial RTOS leader. Our latest release of VxWorks brings to embedded development the following desktop and mobile cutting edge technologies that application developers know and love:

• LLVM: Unlike other commercial RTOSs which offer either closed and proprietary compilers or just offspring of the GNU toolchain, VxWorks comes with the latest LLVM compiler. And much more than a compiler, LLVM is an infrastructure enabling the development and support of innovations, such as libraries and frameworks.

• Boost: To ensure developers are able to develop VxWorks applications natively on the desktop before integrating into their specific hardware, Wind River now offers out-of-the-box support for the Boost C++ libraries. This gives application developers the option to develop their applications on their Windows machines leveraging Boost natively, and provides a seamless migration of their tested code into VxWorks. Until now we have been supporting desktop development with an emulation version of VxWorks called VxSim, part of our IDE Workbench.

This latest release of VxWorks is also part of our newest addition to the Wind River portfolio, Helix Virtualization Platform, an edge compute software platform which consolidates multi-OS and mixed-criticality applications for modernizing legacy systems in aerospace, automotive, defense, industrial, and medical. For additional information on LLVM and Boost, as well as other VxWorks modern application developer tools, visit https://resources.windriver.com/vxworks/vxworks-compilers-and-frameworks.

If you’re already a Wind River customer, please log in here to access this release. If you’re not a customer, please contact us at inquiries@windriver.com to discuss how we can help you deliver your next generation devices and systems. And to stay informed on our latest VxWorks innovations, please visit our VxWorks blog page, and/or subscribe to our blog via our RSS feed.