When your code absolutely, always, *has* to work :-).

[simo]

On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 12:09 -0400, Scott Lovenberg wrote: 
> On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 12:01 PM, simo <idra at samba.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 08:45 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> >> On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 10:29:24AM +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> >> > On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 11:14:18AM -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> >> > > I found this really interesting:
> >> > >
> >> > > http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-is-the-mars-curiosity-rovers-software-built-in/159638#159638
> >> > >
> >> > > http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf
> >> > >
> >> > > Makes Samba seem a bit less reliable somehow :-).
> >> >
> >> > One problem here is that to me it seems those MISRA docs and
> >> > tools are not available for free. I have looked at one
> >> > point, but I could not find anything easily accessible. And,
> >> > no malloc() is difficult for Samba I guess. We don't want a
> >> > pre-allocated array of fsp's I think :-)
> >>
> >> No, I wasn't seriously suggesting no malloc, after all we're
> >> not running on a spaceship :-).
> >>
> >> But I found the contraints really interesting - what you need
> >> to do to C code to make it space-safe !
> >
> > Not just for space.
> >
> > The same guidelines are used for both military and civil aeronautics
> > normally. And nuclear power plants, and anything really, really mission
> > critical where failure would be super expensive or life threatening.
> >
> 
> I was under the impression that avionics and most military code was
> generally written in Ada because of the safety mechanisms built it?
> A friend of mine works for a (large) company that does medical testing
> and everything is written in Python.  I thought he was joking when he
> first told me.

Medical devices are a joke nowadays, search for hacking insulin pumps,
the situation there is dire.
Medical devices are far from running decent software I wouldn't take
them as examples.

As for military it depends which military I guess, my knowledge comes
from the EU side and is admittedly a bit dated :)

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>