The notion of technical debt was introduced by Howard G. Cunningham in 1992. It refers to the phenomenon whereby technical decisions are taken to obtain a short-term advantage at the cost of longer-term disadvantage. It is a powerful metaphor because technical debt and financial debt are indeed very similar.

In safety-related development, nothing can be trusted blindly. And the C Standard Library makes no exception. For a small selection, be aware that there are implementations in widespread use where:

We live in a world where our safety increasingly depends on software. It has now become so deeply ingrained in many aspects of modern life that, quite literally at times, we can’t live without it. This reflects three broad, converging industry trends: increased software complexity, greater software dependency, and growing demand for fast, accurate, safety critical performance from software.

Analysts say that the global shortage of computer chips may last until the end of 2022.  In the words of Simon Segars, Arm Holdings chief executive

"This isn't a short-term problem with a short-term solution."

Compiler warnings are useful, but they are highly unreliable. In addition, they are no substitute for language subsetting, as mandated by most functional safety standards and typically achieved by complying to the MISRA coding standards.

There is a popular quote in the software verification and validation community:

"Without a specification, a system cannot be right or wrong, it can only be surprising!"

(Paraphrased from W. D. Young, W. E. Boebert, and R. Y. Kain; "Proving a Computer System Secure", The Scientific Honeyweller 6(2), pp. 18-27, 1985.)

Last update: May 2022

This month, the BUGSENG team is launching a raft of new services and support for developers, QA and safety teams. We’ve designed them in response to feedback from our customers about the continual challenges you face balancing safety with available resources, budgets and project deadlines. Our new ECLAIR 3.9.0 release has three valuable new features to help you.

Developing critical systems software in C saves time and money if you have proper language subsetting and compiler qualification.

Managing software development projects is a tough job. You’re constantly juggling resources, deadlines, budgets and risk. It’s like running a small city.

BUGSENG have been running MISRA C/C++ workshops, seminars and presentations across Europe and India in recent years. As a result, we’ve had several requests for some of this learning and expertise to be translated to a webinar format. We’re delighted to announce we’ve done just that and will be running the first five webinars from March to June.

Roberto Bagnara and Dr Patricia Hill of BUGSENG are currently working on a joint paper with Michael Barr, a leading embedded systems software engineer and consultant. The paper discusses the relationship between BARR-C: 2018 and MISRA C: 2012.  These are the two most widely used C coding standards and the paper details their parallel and serial adoption. 

When Lonely Planet asked travelers for their ‘lost in translation’ photos of signs and menus from around the world, they had over 1,000, often hilarious, responses. Even when communicating in natural languages and dialects, the potential for confusion is immense. We see a similar but more serious issue of confusion around the C programming language.