Waste treatment is a form of industrial infrastructure. Infrastructure lasts decades. What I've always wondered about is whether there is a hardware/software platform designed to last forever. I don't know much about IBM Mainframes but from what little I have heard they do provide such a platform.

The question is whether we can build such a platform with opensource tooling and make it scale down to microcontrollers (KB of RAM), medium sized MCUs (MB of RAM) and SBCs (100s of MBs to 1 GB of RAM). The support burden is very high so whatever distro/RTOS would have to make it possible to run every binary on any architecture without recompilation.

Lots of people say that the JVM is that platform but the garbage collector makes it insufficient in my opinion. We also need the ability to run existing C code to reduce the porting burden. I think WASM could fit the bill.

If someone doesn't call this cool then I don't know. Of course in practice nobody cares and people just dig out ancient C compilers.

You just don't change anything, and that's how you last forever, like COBOL.

c++ is the standard for most industrial robotics and microcontrollers in my experience, so I'd say that's your answer. Most of the ones that need something more are running that code on some form of linux so you can ssh into them for debugging.

A growing portion are using ROS with their linux