Performance and power evaluation of C++ object-oriented programming in embedded processors

The development of high-performance and lower power portable devices relies on both the underlying hardware architecture and technology as well as on the application software that executes on embedded processor cores. One way to confront the increasing complexity and decreasing time-to-market of embedded software is by means of modular and reusable code, forcing software designers to use objected oriented programming languages such as C+ + [6]. However, the object-oriented approach is known to introduce a significant performance penalty compared to classical procedural programming. In this paper, the object oriented programming style is evaluated in terms of both performance and power for embedded applications. Profiling results indicate that C++ programs apart from being slower than their corresponding C versions, consume significantly more energy. Further analysis shows that this is mainly due to the increased instruction count, larger code size and increased number of accesses to the data memory for the object-oriented versions. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.