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Not really. There are plenty of chips out there without even a C compiler. Some don't even support Turing Completeness. There's even more that were designed and installed before manufacturers started slapping C compilers together for their DSPs, FPGAs, and MCUs.

It would be weird to care about memory safety when your board doesn't even have a heap!

To me, it's less terrifying than a complete rewrite in a modern language. Modern languages are great. Rewrites are often littered with bugs.

Systems like that tend to be designed with different kinds of safeties. A mildly silly example - your typical Rails app doesn't have a watchdog timer, your toaster probably does.

An excellent example!

Yes he said reading assembly, not writing. Whatever they use, I'm glad that someone's having a glance at what the compiler spits out. Also could be talking about microcontrollers, and in an industrial setting PLCs wouldn't be unexpected.