All of this requires a large amount of additional work and severely restricts the range of programming languages, libraries, and tools that can be used (since most languages and tools do not provide real-time guarantees). For these reasons, developing real-time systems is very expensive, and they are most commonly used in safety-critical embedded devices. Moreover, “real-time” is not the same as “high-performance”—in fact, real-time systems may have lower throughput, since they have to prioritize timely responses above all else (see also “Latency and Resource Utilization”).
