Embedded software: how to make it efficient?

This paper stresses the importance of designing efficient embedded software and it provides a global view of some of the techniques that have been developed to meet this goal. These techniques include high-level transformations, compiler optimizations reducing the energy consumption of embedded programs and optimizations exploiting architectural features of embedded processors. Such optimizations lead to significant reductions of the execution time, the required energy and the memory size of embedded applications. Despite this, they can hardly be found in any available compiler.