Real-time programming is a software engineering discipline that has been around ever since the dawn of digital computing.
The dream of real-time programmers is to unlock the virtually unlimited potential of software for embedded computer systems -digital computers that are supposed to behave like analog devices. The perfect embedded computer system is invisibly hybrid, it works according to the largely unidentified laws of embedded software but acts according to the laws of physics. The critical interface between embedded software and physics is real-time and yet, while physical processes evolve in real-time, software processes do not. Only the embedded computer system as a whole - em- bedded software and hardware- determines a complex notion of so-called soft-time to which the software processes adhere: mapping soft-time to real-time is the art of real-time programming.
We discuss various real-time programming models that support the development of real-time programs based on different abstractions of soft-time. We informally introduce a real-time process model to study (1) the compositionality of the real-time programming models and (2) the semantics of real-time programs developed in these models.

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  Christoph Kirsch is full professor and holds a chair at the Department of Computer Sciences of the University of Salzburg, Austria. Since 2008 he is also a visiting scholar at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley.
  He received his Dr.Ing. degree from Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, in 1999 while at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science. From 1999 to 2004 he worked as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in concurrent programming and systems, virtual execution environments, and embedded software. Dr. Kirsch co-invented the Giotto and HTL languages, and lead the JAviator UAV project for which he received an IBM faculty award in 2007. He co-founded the International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), served as ACM SIGBED chair from 2011 until 2013, and is currently associate editor of ACM TODAES.