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Genuinely curious (I don’t work with low level systems day-to-day), but why would C/C++ be better for safety?

I would imagine that the risk of bugs related to memory access and data racing would be pretty high, compared to a higher-level language or something like Rust that focuses on safety.

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AFAIK (and I am not an expert) when they use C/C++ in automotive systems (in the automotive part, not elsewhere) they might tend to use deterministic programming (f.e. fixed-length arrays, no allocations, etc.) which eliminate most of the bugs.

But, again, I am not an expert and Toyota's sudden acceleration problem was said to be caused by bad C programming (said by some, not by others).

I thought it was caused by loose floormats.

Tooling and experience. In principle, there are other languages that might be better than C or C++ for safety-critical software. You know all the hoary jokes about the difference between theory and practice?

> You know all the hoary jokes about the difference between theory and practice?

Only in theory; do you have a practical example?

Can't a guy leave anything as an exercise to the reader anymore?

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