CORBA: Catching The Next Wave (1997) | Hacker News Reader

CORBA: Catching The Next Wave (1997)

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19 pointsLammy5 comments

The US military had a project to unify all their hardware radios into a mega SDR (software defined radio) project called JTRS. It was a massive debacle and didn't deliver very much. One of their bad decisions was to organise it around CORBA. I was amazed when I read that - CORBA did not solve a critical issue for them; it was just a big distraction. You can think of SDR as being a bit like ffmpeg or gstreamer - a collection of DSP modules. Plugability is a useful feature of those codebases, but the critical requirement is efficient data flow. IIRC this all happened somewhat after CORBA fell out of fashion in the software world too

Ars Technica has a couple of good articles about JTRS from 2012[0] and 2018[1].

EDIT: Link from the 1st article to a report by David Axe @ The Center for Public Integrity[2].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-t...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-a...

[2] https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/failure-to-com...

Yeah those are good

What they should have done is a smaller project to roll up all the old legacy radios into SDR, leaving the new ones as custom silicon. That would have stood a decent chance of working, and then they could go for the more ambitious goals later . Problem is that it would not have got the people working on it into the exciting (and higher revenue) new radios.

N.b. recently we had a bit of a small scandal in Poland which, among details, had the question of why perfectly fine radios had to be replaced on a bunch of new machines.

The official answer is that the new (L3Harris) radios are for better cooperation with M1 Abrams (the scandalous part was that the machines weren't supposed to cooperate with Abrams).

The unofficial addendum however was that "Americans implement STANAGs in not really compliant or compatible ways"

From my (limited) exposure, CORBA might have been the least problematic decision in the whole project

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