Well the definition is Soft Real-Time (which may apply here) vs. Hard Real-Time (i.e. car ECU).

But having done university research work in the field of hard real-time systems I also think "naahh thats not real-time" every time I see some Web-Framework advertised as such. There is a big set of interesting problems in hard real-time systems: Complex scheduling algorithms, fault proctection and recovery, bus systems that are also able to fulfil your timing requirements....

If you spend some time doing this kind of work your had will wrap around different problems. You cannot take malloc granted, you always fear that the compiler does something wrong or that you better write that routine in inline ASM. Etc.

That said, I do a lot of stuff in python now and its refreshing, but I miss these problems a little bit.

> I think that there is some abuse of the term real-time these days:

From your link:

<quote>

Soft

The usefulness of a result degrades after its deadline, thereby degrading the system's quality of service.

<quote>

A lot of web applications are soft realtime. Chat, Stock updates, news updates...hell twitter and fb updates are soft realtime