... spawned last weekend on a local hw-related forum, incidentally. A proponent of RTOS suggested, that [once the RTOS is mastered] many problems can be solved faster and easier than without it. Surely, there is a class of applications which can benefit from a certain style of programming (other might suffer from it, yet another might be in between). And, surely, there are developers who specialise in that class of applications (even if they might not be aware of this fact).

And then he came up with an example where the RTOS has a true edge over any other solution. In fact, it is a canonical example of the problem what the RTOS solves the best, even if I am not sure the proponent was aware of this. Imagine an application receiving a serial stream and decoding it in some way. Imagine, that the incoming data are large, say in packets of hundreds of bytes (so it's impractical to impossible to store them all), but the decoder in fact extracts only a few bytes of information of them, so it needs only a few local variables. And now imagine, that you have several serial ports, and all of them receive the same protocol and have to run the same decoder, simultaneously.

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Oh yes, we all surely know that the "real time" expression in "RTOS" is only a marketing buzzword, and the real benefits lie completely elsewhere... :-)

JW