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Comment by 0xDEF | Hacker News Reader

A lot of robotics projects like this are done by people who only have a background in mechanical engineering. This team seems to have dedicated software people so they can use ROS (Python/C++). However it's common in robotics to just draw something in Simulink/Stateflow that is pushed to the microcontroller or FPGA. No low-level C expert required.

I'm sure most software people will be horrified how much "safety critical software" in modern cars and aircrafs is autogenerated based on something drawn up in Simulink/Stateflow.

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Is this really that bad? Presumably the autogenerated c doesn't have any array over reads and it probably initializes values properly

I think companies that do actual life/death safety critical software should hire dedicated software people instead of relying on closed-source proprietary visual programming tools for mechanical engineers.

Simulink / Stateflow and more generally 'synchronous programming languages' have a rich academic lineage and are particularly well adapted to safety-critical tasks.

These languages bring a lot of key guarantees that you can't (easily) get from more classical languages like bounded memory usage, hard real time guarantees, numerical properties, ability to prove theoretical properties about the model etc...

It's also not like having your code written as a text file would save you from using closed source proprietary compilers or languages (Ada, Ferrocene, various C distributions) for safety-critical software.

Rather than "instead" it can be both. I don't want mechanical engineers hand writing observer models and PIDs in bare metal C, but I also don't want software engineerings designing my observer models and PIDs. They are different tools for different jobs.

Those tools are closed source so they probably have many undiscovered bugs.

Yes, in addition to Simulink, see AUTOSAR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOSAR

From my understanding it's very prevalent in automotive to generate microcontroller code.

While AUTOSAR does generate code, the code is highly coupled with the "core" of the module, it's more configuration data rather than the logic itself.

What’s wrong with Simulink? It is better than the average C developers code in terms of safety and correctness

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