brogrammers rejected it. Nerds like Margaret Hamilton stood on principle
This caption is misleading btw. She never worked directly for NASA, she worked at MIT who were contracted by NASA for the software.
I also know people who have worked in nuclear energy and aviation software and they are really serious about not taking shortcuts. And regularly complain about higher ups saying things and occasionally pressuring them against industry standards in the name of speeding things up.
For some of the really flight critical stuff that I picked their brains on, the on-cpu cache was disabled because using it would make deterministally analyzing the executive time too difficult. There also wasn’t a pre-emptive multitasking scheduler but instead every task would run during a scheduled time slot in a big superloop.
All of this caution actually made the software a lot more primitive than the software that Margaret Hamilton led the development of for the Apollo program, but these days cpu cycles and memory are a lot cheaper than the engineering time to implement all these things in a safe way, or so they said.
brogrammers rejected it. Nerds like Margaret Hamilton stood on principle
This caption is misleading btw. She never worked directly for NASA, she worked at MIT who were contracted by NASA for the software.
I also know people who have worked in nuclear energy and aviation software and they are really serious about not taking shortcuts. And regularly complain about higher ups saying things and occasionally pressuring them against industry standards in the name of speeding things up.
The only thing I know about software engineering in aviation is that they don’t even fuck with dynamic memory allocation. They are not fucking around.
For some of the really flight critical stuff that I picked their brains on, the on-cpu cache was disabled because using it would make deterministally analyzing the executive time too difficult. There also wasn’t a pre-emptive multitasking scheduler but instead every task would run during a scheduled time slot in a big superloop.
All of this caution actually made the software a lot more primitive than the software that Margaret Hamilton led the development of for the Apollo program, but these days cpu cycles and memory are a lot cheaper than the engineering time to implement all these things in a safe way, or so they said.