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> In 2013 I was working in nuclear power plant automation ... the job required reading a lot of assembly code. Does anyone else find this terrifying? Nuclear
by Analemma_ 7y ago
> In 2013 I was working in nuclear power plant automation ... the job required reading a lot of assembly code.
Does anyone else find this terrifying? Nuclear power plant automation should be done in the safest of the safe languages. I would be alarmed at the thought of stuff like this being written in C, never mind in assembly!
- ARandomerDude 7y agoTo me, it's less terrifying than a complete rewrite in a modern language. Modern languages are great. Rewrites are often littered with bugs.
- sixplusone 7y agoYes he said reading assembly, not writing. Whatever they use, I'm glad that someone's having a glance at what the compiler spits out. Also could be talking about microcontrollers, and in an industrial setting PLCs wouldn't be unexpected.
- holy_city 7y agoNot really. There are plenty of chips out there without even a C compiler. Some don't even support Turing Completeness. There's even more that were designed and installed before manufacturers started slapping C compilers together for their DSPs, FPGAs, and MCUs. It would be weird to care about memory safety when your board doesn't even have a heap!
- pvg 7y agoSystems like that tend to be designed with different kinds of safeties. A mildly silly example - your typical Rails app doesn't have a watchdog timer, your toaster probably does.
- okaleniuk 7y agoAn excellent example!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]