Autopilot: an open source driving agent

Re:Autopilot: an open source driving agent by MichaelBurge on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @10:06PM (#13076883)

As an example of some requirements, any recursion is banned unless accompanied by a termination proof that keeps track of stack size. No calls to malloc() or free() are allowed, and so any library you might use that allocates memory is banned.

It's far easier to get the code working in something like Python, and then rewrite it in safety-critical C later. And the kinds of people who can write self-driving cars in Python are using very different skills than the kinds who can write safety-critical C, so it might not even be the same person.

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Re:Autopilot: an open source driving agent by time4tea on Thursday December 01, 2016 @03:06AM (#13077986)

Hmm. Clearly this code is miles away from MISRA compliance (although compliance doesn't mean that the software is any good)

Even so, sorry to say, the code is miles away from any decent software standard. It is almost exactly what you might call CRAP (classes really a procedure) and mixes responsibilities all over the shop. Little attempt is made to abstract behaviour, and there are differing units, and random multipliers all over the place. Using c++ and python, both of which are OO many classes of error could be avoided if any actual OO features were used, even if MISRA was not a target, sadly the code doesn't do that.

This has all the hallmarks of software that doesnt know if it's doing m/s or mph.

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Re:Autopilot: an open source driving agent by JoshTriplett on Thursday December 01, 2016 @12:27AM (#13077388)

Exactly; the delta from Python to C is smaller than the delta from C to "safety-critical real-time C". Might as well prototype and simulate in a higher-level language that's obviously not the final one, rather than writing in a language someone might mistake for production and trying to incrementally evolve it into a full safety-critical version.

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