The design of embedded systems is driven by strong constraints in terms of performance, silicon area and power consumption, as well as pressure on the cost and time-to-market. This has three consequences: 1) many-core systems are becoming mainstream, but there is still no satisfactory approach for distributing software applications on these platforms; 2) these systems integrate heterogeneous processors for efficiency reasons, thus programming them requires complex compilation environments; 3) hardware resources are precious and low-level languages are still a must to exploit them fully. These factors negatively impact the programmability of many-core platforms and limit our ability to address the challenges of the next decade. This paper devises a new programming approach leveraging processor virtualization and component-based software engineering paradigms to address these issues all together. We present a programming model based on C for developing fine grain component-based applications and a toolset that compiles them into a processor-independent bytecode representation that can be deployed on heterogeneous MPSoCs. We also discuss the effectiveness of this approach and present future directions that will have a key role in addressing the above challenges.