Re: Safety-Critical Systems Developed Using C++

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Thats one of the reasonable justifications for using C (or some other
language with less safety features than Ada) for an embedded, critical
system. There just don't exist Ada compilers targeted to every processor
that is out there. (Still, there seem to be plenty of processors that *are*
supported!)

And you're right - you can build safe systems in any language. It just means
more effort expended to verify correctness and/or fix the bugs. The big
advantage to Ada in this realm is that it catches a lot of potential bugs up
front in the process where they are quick and cheap to fix. Finding it in an
integration test or somewhere else down the pipeline, it gets real costly to
fix.

MDC


Britt Snodgrass wrote:

> One technical reason for using C is that the ILS units use unique
> processors such as 16-bit fixed-point DSP CPUs for which there is no Ada
> compiler available.

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