[SystemSafety] New paper on MISRA C

[Andrew Banks]

On Thu, September 13, 2018 6:57 am, Paul Sherwood wrote:
>
> AFAIK MISRA C is all about improving determinism of software, i.e.
> increasing software component reliability. As of 2018 are ws still at the
> point where we can't deliver designed-in safety without heavy reliance on
> deterministic behaviour of microcontroller-scale components?
>

The real problem we have in the software world is that, frankly, most are
just enthusiastic amateurs - something that Professor Martin Thomas of the
Royal Academy of Engineering has written about in Tuesday's Financial
Times.

We have little (often no) engineering discipline, and we have become
accustomed to regular bug-fixes as being perfectly normal... FFS,
Microsoft now have a WEEKLY bug-fix for Windows.

That in 2018 "Just write the code" is deemed an acceptable life-cycle is a
blight on our profession.  Any suggestion that we should relax any of the
few controls, or best-practices, we have is, IMHO little more than
crazy-talk!

I'm not suggesting MISRA C is perfect... but IMHO it is the best we have -
and I'd rather make it even better, than entertain ideas of scrapping it.