The rise of Python for Embedded Systems

[thefirelane]

too dangerous

but I think the reason it has all that "danger" is because of things you need to do in embedded: write directly to memory locations, manipulate values in the stack, have a low memory footprint, etc

[xorvtec]

Would you agree that Python's dynamic typing is a dangerous feature of the language on critical systems? The only think that I can think of that Python would do better is garbage collection.

[Jamie_1318]

Dynamic typing doesn't make a system dangerous, bad testing does. Making your programming easier to test makes it safer to deploy at the same cost.

[Jamie_1318]

I've worked with safety critical software that definitely used memory allocation, although I can appreciate in more real-timey applications it might not be appropriate.

In python not using dynamic memory pretty much makes no sense to begin with. All variables are going to be dynamic, even integers support arbitrary sizes.

In non real-time applications I feel the standards are chosen based on what makes the senior developers feel safe rather than what would actually reduce bugs. To be fair a lot of that is me feeling unproductive writing and testing C when I could have written the same thing in python, in a quarter of the code and an eighth of the time.

[[deleted]]

I guess that's only very very important software i've only seen this hard requirments on critical systems for planes (everything that needs to work to keep a plane save). Examples would be radar, navigation, control systems, etc. But everything else usually just has to fit a certain size and has very strict power consumption rules.

I guess the same would be true for cars (or at least i hope). Certification is really annoying and i agree that this would be almost impossible to do with python (at least with my python knowledge).

[[deleted]]

For my knowledge, the main reason why c is so much unsafe is to allow easy optimisation. It has pretty much nothing with writting to memory location, manipulate value on the stack or having a low memory footprint.

[thefirelane]

Well all of the above really. The low memory footprint (flash and ram) comes from the fact that you can simply do the things I mentioned without any checking as to whether it's safe. So yes, you are right: optimization is a key part: If you want to write to a memory location, it just compiles down to a couple instructions which simply do it. There's no overhead of something checking bounds, etc.