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Comment by ensiferum | Hacker News Reader

I think not a single actual application is completely well formed. They all work on luck. Especially in the embedded world. Btw, my android just rebooted.

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"In the embedded world" covers a huge area, including mission-critical avionics code, which likely has much higher safety standard than, say, Android.

Although from hearing about the Apollo Guidance Computer, it's just as much of a miracle they were able to get it to work without any debugging or compilers, with basically one shot to write the program to ROM.

Well they put in an effort of 1400 man years for just the software. They even built an interpreter, because (flight/trajectory) requirements were changing all the time.

Also: "The highest level of testing was performed with a high fidelity digital simulation of the computer, spacecraft hardware, and mission environment."

http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf

And the architecture of the whole system is commonly an infinite while loop.

Not necesarily. RTOS is gaining market.

If you're interested, the next time your phone crashes like that, /proc/last_kmesg (or similar) may tell you the reason.

Whether or not this is acceptable for software and hardware to have gotten this unreliable is another question entirely.

"Complex systems usually operate in failure mode", (c) John Gall

Wow. How do you put up with that kind of behavior from such a mission critical device like a phone?

You don't die when your phone reboots.

Parent was sarcastic.

Actually I wasn't. If my phone had the habit of rebooting while I was on a conference call/webex, I might endanger a contract or lose a customer.

For me, my phone is mission critical.

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