Solid Sands is happy to announce that its CTO, Marcel Beemster, will be presenting at the 2017 European LLVM Developers Meeting ([http://llvm.org/devmtg/2017-03/index.html)]. This is the abstract:
Using LLVM for Safety-Critical Applications
Would you step into a car if you knew that the software for the brakes was compiled with LLVM? The question is not academic. Compiled code is used today for many of the safety-critical components in modern cars. For the development of autonomous driving systems, the car industry demands safety qualified, high performance compilers to compile image and radar signal processing libraries written in C++, among other things. Fortunately, there are international standards such as ISO 26262 that describe the requirements for electronic components, and their software, to be used in safety-critical systems.
Perhaps surprisingly, quality and safety are not necessarily the same, although they go together well. A compiler that dumps core during compilation would not be considered good quality, but it would be very safe: no erroneous code is generated that can be used in a safety-critical component.
This presentation discusses general techniques used to design safe systems and more specifically the steps that are needed to develop sufficient trust for compilation tools to be used in cars, medical equipment and nuclear installations. For compiler libraries, often an invisible part to the user of an SDK, safety requirements are actually set higher than those of the compiler itself. This is logical to the extent that the compiler itself does not, and the library code does become part of the safety-critical component.
We will look at the steps that are necessary to qualify compilers and libraries, the V-model of software engineering, MC/DC analysis, the MISRA coding guidelines, how LLVM’s engineering can be improved, what this means for the developer, and if you, as a compiler developer, can be held responsible for a car breaking down with fatal consequences.