Abstract: As embedded systems become more and more complex, and the time to market becomes shorter, there is a need in the embedded systems community to find better programming languages that let the programmers develop correct code faster. The programming languages used today--typically C and/or Assemblers--are just too error-prone. The Java technology has therefore gained a lot of interest from developers of embedded systems in the last few years. We propose an approach based on compiling Java into native machine code via C as an intermediate language. The C code generation process should also add close interaction with a fully pre-emptive incremental garbage collector and a small and efficient real-time kernel. Tests performed on a small 8-bit microprocessor show that it is possible to use a modern object-oriented language with automatic memory management-such as Java-and yet generate fully predictable code that can be run in very small devices with severe memory constraints.