CppCon2014: Bill Emshoff "Using C++ on Mission and Safety Critical Platforms"

The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is the first major DOD aircraft program to use C++. Much of this software is either safety critical or mission critical and so must be written in such a way as to be clear, readable, unambiguous, testable, and maintainable. We discuss the driving requirements behind the standard and its evolution, give a quick overview of our standard, and explain how it differs from later standards such as MISRA C++. We also discuss lessons learned over our nine‑year history of applying the standard to a large embedded software program, address ambiguities in rules, and highlight difficulties with automated checking of conformance with the standard. Bill Emshoff, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin, has been programming in C++ for over 12 years and serves as an informal interpreter of the JSF coding standard and champion of static analysis to catch and prevent coding errors before formal testing.