this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
145 points (92.9% liked)
Programming
17454 readers
142 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone who is in the aerospace industry and has dealt with safety critical code with NASA oversight, it's a little disingenuous to pin NASA's coding standards entirely on attempting to make things memory safe. It's part of it, yeah, but it's a very small part. There are a ton of other things that NASA is trying to protect for.
Plus, Rust doesn't solve the underlying problem that NASA is looking to prevent in banning the C++ standard library. Part of it is DO-178 compliance (or lack thereof) the other part is that dynamic memory has the potential to cause all sorts of problems on resource constrained embedded systems. Statically analyzing dynamic memory usage is virtually impossible, testing for it gets cost prohibitive real quick, it's just easier to blanket statement ban the STL.
Also, writing memory safe code honestly isn't that hard. It just requires a different approach to problem solving, that just like any other design pattern, once you learn and get used to it, is easy.
I'd've thought Ada would play a larger role in aerospace, because of these issues, among others.
the CVE list would disagree with you.
This statement is kinda ironic after you just said it’s “easier” to just ban the entire STL and dynamic memory allocation as a whole. You already left the domain of what most consider “easy” quite a while ago.
Op said NASA thinks it's easier.