On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 18:15:49 +0200, =?UTF-8?Q?Bj=c3=b6rn_Lundin?=
 wrote:

>> There's a whole
>> world out there that does not use gcc or FOSS tools.
>
>Yes, but there is also a world that uses gcc for other languages than c.
>Professionally. With very high demands on standards.
>gcc contains the opensourced Ada compiler, and if you pay for support
>you get a certificate that it conforms to the test-suite, which used to
>be called validating.
>
>I'd say a great deal of space/flight/train system use gcc in form of
>gnat (as this part of gcc is called)

I accept that gcc and friends are widely used. I use it myself from
time to time. However, despite the amount of money thrown at it by
companies such as ARM and Intel, it's not considered to be a good
compiler by people who know about such things. In the main, it's
good enough.

>However, I was baffled at the european reliable software conference 2015
>i Madrid, http://www.dit.upm.es/~ae2015/ , when one participant - Andras
>Balazs - had a very interesting talk about the comet lander philae (from
>the rosetta misson). He said that they started the project in 1994 and
>coded the landing code i forth. It used the cpu best.

The processors were RTX2010s from Harris Semiconductor (now Intersil),
which used a two-stack architecture based on Forth. We (MPE) did the
official Forth development tools for these CPUs. C and other
frame-stack languages were not a good fit on this processor.

Les Hatton, the author of "Safer C", has this to say:
"the programming language appears to be irrelevant in most empirical
studies of injected defect, implemented size and similar behaviour –
the most significant factor by a long way remains the quality of the
engineers producing the system. However, this disguises an unpleasant
truth about OO in general and C++ in particular.

I first studied and published evidence on this in 1997 in IEEE
journals. The result of the original studies was a systematic bias in
C++ towards significantly LONGER defect correction times. In other
words, when you make a mistake in C++, you really pay for it. If the
use of C++ led to less defects per implemented functionality, we might
be able to live with this but there is no evidence that it does."

There's a much longer version of this article at
  http://www.mpeforth.com/news-gossip-and-rumour/

Stephen


--
Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

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