Re: Safety-Critical Systems Developed Using C++

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3A664EC4.6F679BE0@acm.org>,
  Marin David Condic <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> wrote:

> I had a ten year study of error rates in embedded code for safety
> critical systems. Moving to Ada reduced the error rates by a factor of
> four. Same programmers. Same problem domain. Same sort of system
> architecture. No way around it. Ada's compile time checking, strong

That's interesting. Rational performed a similar study on their compiler
codebase using data culled over 11 years of development, and found that
their Ada code had 1/7th the defect rate of their C code and requied
only half as many fixes per SLOC. Even compensating for differences in
experience, training, function, and language expressivenes, the big gap
was still there. Perhaps that's why many of Rational's heavy-hitters
(including Grady Booch of UML fame) are big Ada proponents.

Of course this study was for a large end-user application (a compiler
and associated tools), not for a safety-critical system.

For those interested, the full report is available at
http://www.rational.com/products/whitepapers/337.jsp .

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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