In the beginning, real-time operating systems (RTOSs) were primarily used in military, aerospace, and high-end industrial control applications. This has changed dramatically as low-cost, fast, and abundant computing power made embedded real-time computing practical for a growing number of traditional and IoT applications.1
In recent years, RTOSs have become easier to use and available with large libraries of development tools and application-specific stacks. Likewise, the RTOSs themselves have undergone differentiation, with architectures and features that are optimized to suit a specific type of application or platform.