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The manual memory management and lack of standard libraries make C programming language the only useful language when it comes to safety critical domain. (Excep
by digamber_kamat 15y ago
The manual memory management and lack of standard libraries make C programming language the only useful language when it comes to safety critical domain. (Exception is Ada).
Java or Python are super cool, there is no doubt about it. But when you have to program a metro rail or Eurofighter jet controls, one has to give hard deadline to the tasks. Unfortunately no high level language can be used in such cases. Garbage collection adds undeterminism to the temporal properties of the executing tasks and hence can not be user in real time safety critical domains.
- killbot5000 15y agoThere are new techniques wrt to garbage collected languages and hard deadlines (eg, every period has a dedicated amount of time to garbage collection, whether it needs it or not).
- jethroalias97 15y agoSo it's possible my airplane might fall out of the sky because there is not enough memory because not enough time was devoted to garbage collection? That doesn't sound like a great solution. Not to say that C is necessarily the ideal solution. The main reason the author hasn't seen competitors to C is because the author didn't look for one. Vala is decent and there are many others, they're just not sufficiently better than C to result in people switching.