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This is a tangent, but Wikipedia says this about that chip: The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability prod
by technion 10y ago
This is a tangent, but Wikipedia says this about that chip:
The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif.
Am I alone in the concern that in a safety critical environment, the phrase "low cost" should be more of a concern than the choice of language?
- randomacct44 10y agoTotally not :) Just for reference, I'm not actually planning to build a safety-critical device with an ESP8266. What piqued my curiosity was this project: http://openaps.org http://openaps.org It's basically a homebrew controller implementation that uses data from a continuous blood glucose monitor to talk to an insulin pump. They're using Node and JavaScript from what I can tell from the GitHub. They're obviously conservative for safety concerns. The code runs on a Raspberry Pi 3. This got me wondering - what language WOULD be used in 2016 to code something safety-critical? Is there anything coming from research that's better than C? My initial thoughts were something like Elixir, but really anything strongly type-checked and verifiable. Rust was another thought I had. Looking at this my immediate thought was also "what's the tiniest micro that could do this job instead of the power-hungry Pi?". I guess everything is C or assembler in the end anyway :) The impression I get from these responses is that a restricted subset of plain C seems to be the most practical solution today. EDIT: I'm the OP if it isn't obvious, different account.
- technion 10y agoThanks for the clarification. I had a look around and I can only guess that the extensive hard limits that they document in their design fulfil the safety requirements on their own.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]