  There has been much recent interest in adopting functional and reactive
programming for use in real-time system design. Moving toward a more
declarative methodology for developing real-time systems purports to improve
the fidelity of software. To study the benefits of functional and reactive
programming for real-time systems, real-time aware functional compilers and
language runtimes are required. In this paper we examine the necessary changes
to a modern Standard ML compiler, MLton, to provide basic support for real-time
execution. We detail our current progress in modifying MLton with a threading
model that supports priorities, a chunked object model to support real-time
garbage collection, and low level modification to execute on top of a real-time
operating system. We present preliminary numbers and our work in progress
prototype, which is able to boot ML programs compiled with MLton on x86
machines.
