1. A real-time virtual machine method (RTVMM) for implementing real-time systems and activities, the RTVMM comprising the steps: implementing an O-OPL program that can run on computer systems of different designs, an O-OPL program being based on an object-oriented programming language (O-OPL) comprising object type declarations called classes, each class definition describing the variables that are associated with each object of the corresponding class and all of the operations called methods that can be applied to instantiated objects of the specified type, a "method" being a term of art describing the unit of procedural abstraction in an object-oriented programming system, an O-OPL program comprising one or more threads wherein the run-time stack for each thread is organized so as to allow accurate identification of type-tagged pointers contained on the stack without requiring type tag information to be updated each time the stack's content changes, the O-OPL being an extension of a high-level language (HLL) exemplified by Java, HLL being an extension of a low-level language (LLL) exemplified by C and C++, a thread being a term of art for an independently-executing task, an O-OPL program being represented at run time by either O-OPL byte codes or by native machine codes.
1. A real-time virtual machine method (RTVMM) for implementing real-time systems and activities, the RTVMM comprising the steps: implementing an O-OPL program that can run on computer systems of different designs, an O-OPL program being based on an object-oriented programming language (O-OPL) comprising object type declarations called classes, each class definition describing the variables that are associated with each object of the corresponding class and all of the operations called methods that can be applied to instantiated objects of the specified type, a "method" being a term of art describing the unit of procedural abstraction in an object-oriented programming system, an O-OPL program comprising one or more threads wherein the run-time stack for each thread is organized so as to allow accurate identification of type-tagged pointers contained on the stack without requiring type tag information to be updated each time the stack's content changes, the O-OPL being an extension of a high-level language (HLL) exemplified by Java, HLL being an extension of a low-level language (LLL) exemplified by C and C++, a thread being a term of art for an independently-executing task, an O-OPL program being represented at run time by either O-OPL byte codes or by native machine codes. 12. The RTVMM of claim 1 wherein one of the implemented threads is a garbage collection thread that operates asynchronously thereby resulting in the garbage collection thread being interleaved with other threads in arbitrary order, objects subject to garbage collection being either finalizable or non-finalizable, a finalizable object being subject to an action that is performed when the memory space allocated to the finalizable object is reclaimed by the garbage collection thread, the finalizing action being specified by including a non-empty finalizer method in the class definition, the garbage collection thread being able to distinguish a thread's pointer variables from the thread's non-pointer variables, preemption of a thread being allowed only if the thread is in a state identified as a preemption point, a thread being allowed to hold pointers in variables between preemption points that may not be visible to the garbage collection thread, pointer variables that may not be visible to the garbage collection thread being called fast pointers, pointer variables that are visible to the garbage collection thread being called slow pointers, each LLL, function being identified as either preemptible or non-preemptible.