Why recursion may be the death of you

[sm625]

7. Stack overflow in the "kitchen-sink" process would cause the OS to kill the process, and as this process had the watchdog code and error logging code, it would not be restarted, nor would any error codes be logged.

This has nothing to do with recursion. If a critical process dies then the OS must place the engine in the failsafe state, which means throttle in idle position. Clearly it wasnt doing that. None of the other stuff matters.

 

[BikeJunkie]

I could never work as a programmer for critical systems like this - I would seriously never be able to sleep.

 

[Train]

This has nothing to do with recursion. If a critical process dies then the OS must place the engine in the failsafe state, which means throttle in idle position. Clearly it wasnt doing that. None of the other stuff matters.

If the critical process dies BECAUSE of recursion, it has something to do with recursion. Especially if the regulation regarding this safety critical system says you are not allowed to use recursion.

 

[BikeJunkie]

Just because I'm curious about the constraints/standards imposed on such systems - and I've never done any embedded programming - how do programmers usually go about solving what would otherwise be trivial/mundane problems in your typical VM/GC development environment?