Re:Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
by loup-vaillant on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @02:51PM
(#14196799)
Forcing a change away from C/C++ is easy: regulation. If a software error (or vulnerability) kills anyone, the vendor is to stop all sales and recall all cars immediately. Sales can resume pending an evaluation period, and the evaluation is to be made by independent experts, at the expense of the vendor. (We should heavily imply that such an evaluation can take months, killing the company in the process.)
Correct software is expensive. But if we make sure incorrect software is even more expensive, we'll get correct software.
Once the industry is forced to get serious about correctness, they will move away from the C/C++ minefield real quick βor at least come up with safe ways of using C and C++.
I used to think that was unlikely. Then I had a few discussions with people about the state of C, and things that could be done to make it default to a slightly more deterministic case by changing how undefined behavior is dealt with in regards to optimization. Now I think it's impossible, because nobody is willing to give up even theoretical unknown performance increases for more security. At least for C. You would have to use something that's much more strict about behavior, like Ada with SPARK, or possibly Rust.
I'm willing to bet most the code already written for these projects is C or C++. Good luck getting that changed if so.