Abstract
Scripting is a powerful, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic, easy way of composing software modules as black boxes. Unfortunately, the high runtime overhead has prevented scripting from being widely adopted in embedded applications. This work proposes to overcome these obstacles by synthesizing light-weight, host-assisted scripting engines for embedded systems. The result is dramatically shortened development cycle due to the much higher-level abstraction, interactive access and dynamic reconfigurability, robust in-field software upgradability, and compact code size. This framework has been successfully applied to ultra low-power sensor nodes with under 10KB of program memory to high-performance platforms with fast Ethernet. Copyright 2005 ACM.