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Back when I was studying Computer Science, the fact that Computer engineering is not engineering was a very hot topic. Engineering comes with certain guarantees. If a you don't put a load more than X on a bridge for the next X years. It will not break.

How can we offer that guarantee as a profession when hardware, drivers, OSes and even libraries that we use change and shift without our control and sometimes consent?

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Software "engineering" will definitely need to be looked at differently from physical, but there are still things we can do.

Critical systems (or at least the critical subsystems) must not allow any unapproved/untested changes. Hence why it's better for safety controls to be hardware/firmware and not part of a general-purpose OS.

It's one reason why you see separate payment terminal hardware on self-checkout kiosks. The payment hardware is more tightly controlled whereas they can modify the kiosk much faster.

There are also RTOS (real time OS) that offer execution time guarantees. Used in aerospace.

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