D for safety critical applications

[IGotD-]

On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 13:35:36 UTC, Gregor Mückl wrote:
>
> There is a fair amount of hate in this post that I can't agree 
> with.

Then you have a crewed up idea what hate means. Hate does not 
mean that you disagree with someone.

> I've worked with certified compilers, too. It was mainly one of 
> the major products in the field. The package was a mixed bag. 
> The custom IDE is lacking and the proprietary build tools are 
> not very good, but the actual compiler for our target platform 
> turned out to be very good. We threw it at a pretty big 
> preexisting codebase and it worked (we had a few places where 
> we were relying on subtle UB - that's on us). Compared to GCC, 
> the generated code would consistently be smaller and thus 
> faster, even when I compared unoptimized builds to GCC with 
> optimizations (curiously, speed optimized GCC output was 
> smaller than size optimized output!).

The main reason some company uses a certain "certified" compiler 
is because the customer demands it. There in between anything is 
possible with any kind of back room deal. Just like doctors get 
money under the table in order to promote a certain drug, which 
we know is commonplace.

The compiler I have worked with had a number of bugs and then I 
tried GCC and of course it ran perfectly with better code 
generation. The answer is of course obvious GCC is used by the 
hundreds of thousands and many contributing to the compiler. This 
compared to a small company creating some "certified" compiler. 
I'm all of commercial SW but I cannot deny that the huge backing 
of the GCC compilers is hard to beat. If I would decide which 
compiler to use I would of course go with GCC and skip the 
certified compiler, however it is the customers that dictates 
what to use.