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Only a person who has never worked on a safety-critical application would say something ignorant like that. (I am neither a Rust nor an Ada user.)

by krapht 7y ago

dpc_pw 7y ago
I have actually worked on safety-critical applications. ISO 26262, MISRA C, ASIL, etc. :D . I even own and drive a car that has my software in it. I am obviously teasing the OP, but there's IMO a lot of truth to it. Safety-critical stuff damn better be simpler, smaller and fundamentally easier or it will fail and kill people. That's why stuff like https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ada/E9bNCvDQ12k/1tezW24ZxdAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ad... makes sense. In a lot of aspects, mission critical-software is much, much "easier": easier to stretch the budgets, easier to not have competition, easier to justify why something can't be done or why it has to take another 3 years of work. While a modern fully functional web browser is a huge pile of complexity, technologies, requirements and yet it is still needs to work under much tighter social, economical and performance pressures. Any bug being widely exploited, could lead to people literally dying or at least having their lives ruined. It's just not as spectacular as "missiles". So I think the OP (and probably you as well :P) is being arrogant by dismissing "firefox", that's all.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I think well designed safety critical bare-metal stuff and well designed browsers have a difference in complexity placement - within bare-metal work you need to be aware of and account for the full domain range of values any systems you talk to can produce (including error output) and account for those - while browsers[1] tend to be more emergently complex with relatively secure and safe input but a lot of complexity in how those inputs are handled. One system is taking a complex world and trying to reduce it to a safe and simple system - the other is taking something safe (some rando user inputs and a pile of HTML) and turning it into something complex - a rendered website. Granted, I think value domain identification is one of the only ways for complex software to at all survive growing into a legacy system - so maybe the core difference is the nice stress free life of a system where the worst outcome of a critical failure is someone not being able to post on facebook ;P 1. Lets ignore firefox and JS and just assume we're in the 90's downloading HTML sites...

Only a person who has never worked on a safety-critical application would say something ignorant like that. (I am neither a Rust nor an Ada user.)

by krapht 7y ago

Only a person who has never worked on a safety-critical application would say something ignorant like that. (I am neither a Rust nor an Ada user.)

dpc_pw 7y ago

I have actually worked on safety-critical applications. ISO 26262, MISRA C, ASIL, etc. :D . I even own and drive a car that has my software in it. I am obviously teasing the OP, but there's IMO a lot of truth to it. Safety-critical stuff damn better be simpler, smaller and fundamentally easier or it will fail and kill people. That's why stuff like https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ada/E9bNCvDQ12k/1tezW24ZxdAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ad... makes sense. In a lot of aspects, mission critical-software is much, much "easier": easier to stretch the budgets, easier to not have competition, easier to justify why something can't be done or why it has to take another 3 years of work. While a modern fully functional web browser is a huge pile of complexity, technologies, requirements and yet it is still needs to work under much tighter social, economical and performance pressures. Any bug being widely exploited, could lead to people literally dying or at least having their lives ruined. It's just not as spectacular as "missiles". So I think the OP (and probably you as well :P) is being arrogant by dismissing "firefox", that's all.

munk-a 7y ago
I think well designed safety critical bare-metal stuff and well designed browsers have a difference in complexity placement - within bare-metal work you need to be aware of and account for the full domain range of values any systems you talk to can produce (including error output) and account for those - while browsers[1] tend to be more emergently complex with relatively secure and safe input but a lot of complexity in how those inputs are handled. One system is taking a complex world and trying to reduce it to a safe and simple system - the other is taking something safe (some rando user inputs and a pile of HTML) and turning it into something complex - a rendered website. Granted, I think value domain identification is one of the only ways for complex software to at all survive growing into a legacy system - so maybe the core difference is the nice stress free life of a system where the worst outcome of a critical failure is someone not being able to post on facebook ;P 1. Lets ignore firefox and JS and just assume we're in the 90's downloading HTML sites...