[Haskell-cafe] Re: Stone age programming for space age hardware?

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Michael Schuerig wrote:
> I was dumbfounded, although I have known all this. I have no personal 
> experience with either embedded or real time software, but I've been 
> aware that C still is the most popular language for that purpose and 
> that coding standards are very restrictive.
> 
> The real reason behind my surprise was, that I was wondering how more 
> modern languages could make inroads into such an environment. Haskell 
> without recursion and dynamic memory allocation? Hard to imagine.

I have absolutely no experience with real time system, but if I were
tasked to write with these coding standards, I would refuse and instead
create a small DSL in Haskell that compiles to the requested subset of C.

After all, the question is this: why use C if you don't actually use C?
The reason is probably that designing/writing a proper DSL is considered
too error prone, but with today's theorem provers, this should no longer
be the case.


Regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com