The regulators (e.g. FAA/CASA/JAA) will accept compliance with DO-178B as a method for certifying avionics. If a manufacturer chooses not to comply with the standard, then they need to show how their method results in a probability of failure of less that 1e-12 for a flight critical box.
Hence, DO-178B serves as a de-facto standard for avionics software certification.
If you want examples of levels, the flight control system is class A, weapon systems are class B (on military aircraft) and Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) is Class D.
DO-178B is very waterfall centric and leaves little scope for any bottom-up development. It also places restrictions on dynamic linking or anything else that cannot be analysed at compile time - polymorphism is a big no-no, as is dynamic allocation of memory.
Speaking of compilers, they need to be certified too - no GCC there. The irony is that is is much easier to certify an assembler than a compiler and therefore far less costly. For larger projects (i.e. > $10M ), you can get certified compilers for C, Ada and a bunch of mysterious languages like Jovial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL).
Yes, they have heard of C++. A small subset of the language is approved for use on the JSF.
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The regulators (e.g. FAA/CASA/JAA) will accept compliance with DO-178B as a method for certifying avionics. If a manufacturer chooses not to comply with the standard, then they need to show how their method results in a probability of failure of less that 1e-12 for a flight critical box.
Hence, DO-178B serves as a de-facto standard for avionics software certification.
If you want examples of levels, the flight control system is class A, weapon systems are class B (on military aircraft) and Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) is Class D.
DO-178B is very waterfall centric and leaves little scope for any bottom-up development. It also places restrictions on dynamic linking or anything else that cannot be analysed at compile time - polymorphism is a big no-no, as is dynamic allocation of memory.
Speaking of compilers, they need to be certified too - no GCC there. The irony is that is is much easier to certify an assembler than a compiler and therefore far less costly. For larger projects (i.e. > $10M ), you can get certified compilers for C, Ada and a bunch of mysterious languages like Jovial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL).
Yes, they have heard of C++. A small subset of the language is approved for use on the JSF.
I can hear the sighs loudly and clearly already