D for safety critical applications

[Gregor Mückl]

On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 10:10:05 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Monday, 8 February 2021 at 11:09:49 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
>> Talking with some colleges. They have some questions regarding 
>> D:
>>
>> 1. Is D ready for prime time á la safety critical applications?
>> (I guess they mean GDC on ARM for example)
>>
>> 2. Are there any plans to make a certified compiler?
>
> Just to put it into some perspective. I have worked with so 
> called certified C/C++ compilers in the automotive industry. I 
> remember encountered several bugs in those compilers as well 
> they are usually far behind when adopting the new language 
> standards. Compare this to GCC, when was the last time you 
> encountered a bug in that compiler? I can't remember any.
>
> The certified compilers which are not better than GCC are 
> usually proprietary and cost money for each user. Here we have 
> a product that is essentially worse than GCC and cost money. 
> What it is really about is a form of corruption. The only 
> positive side is that if you find a bug you can put pressure on 
> the company that provides the compiler but usually that takes 
> several months.

There is a fair amount of hate in this post that I can't agree 
with. 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!).