Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference + OSPOCon 2021

The Apache PLC4X project started as a pure Java project to simplify the communication with industrial systems, hereby providing a major link between the IT and the OT world (OT = IT of the Automation systems). However we always had planned to provide these drivers in multiple languages, that's why we called the project PLC4X and not PLC4J. As maintaining drivers for X protocols in Y languages manually is just not possible, we developed a code-generation system, that allows us to specify industrial protocols in a machine- and human-readable fashion and then have most of the driver code generated in multiple programming languages. In 2020 we finally managed to implement the system for generating drivers in native C. We designed the core library to work without any external libraries and also work on single-threaded devices. With this we are now able to bring industrial communication to edge devices with super-low hardware- and power-requirements. In this talk I want to demonstrate this system and give you an outlook on how we are planning on generating even more of the driver code in the future.