3 ms·

Software has different risk classes. Controlling a 737 has vastly more requirements of the operating system / runtime environment than an app that controls a sm

• Dove 2y ago
  That's exactly what I'm trying to say! By virtue of its being able to seriously injure you, software controlling an insulin pump is safety-critical software. This should make it more like an airliner's fly-by-wire system than like a toy rc car's. Not in terms of complexity or resource usage, but in terms of development philosophy and rigor. Safety critical software wants to be simple and self-contained. I don't work on medical devices, but I have worked with safety-critical software before. While I know compromises are always made in practice, I would naively expect an insulin pump's remote control to be a few hundred lines of very-intensely-vetted C running on the bare metal of a microcontroller. I don't understand what a general purpose OS (!) connected to the internet (!!) is doing in a tech stack that someone notionally had to prove was safe under a wide range of circumstances. It may be paranoia arising from my particular background. I just find it very surprising that the sheer number of layers in an app is considered responsible and appropriate engineering for the use case.