Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?

Greg Menke <gregm-xyzpdq3@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Tim X <timx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Darren New <dnew@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Robert Uhl wrote:
An argument in favour of free software if ever there were one...

No doubt. It still boggles my mind that the US military uses Windows
for *anything* on warships. Payroll? Sure. But on a warship?

Or on the ISS. Two weeks ago, the astronaut spent 45 minutes trying
to reboot a MS-Windows for a problem he had with some software running
on MS-Windows... Puuaaahhahahaaah!


I'm surprised the ISS uses Windows. NASA was a very big supporter of
Linux at one time - there was even a well known article in which they
detailed why they used Linux rather than Windows. Essentially, it was
for stability and smaller disk/memory needs.

Well, as always with big organizations...

But to be precise, I'm not sure it was a NASA laptop. For one thing,
it was on the ISS, and was to drive an "experiment", so I guess the
software would have been designed at some university.

Nonetheless, there is MS-Windows at NASA, we can see some of them even
in the control room, along with Suns, and probably Linux too. Let's
hope it's not the most mission critical ones...


Flight software and mission critical software is definitely not on
Windows. You'll find Windows on regular desktop PC's and laptops.
Mission ops facilities use various flavors of unix, some quite old since
stuff isn't changed until it needs to be. New control centers will
generally be outfitted with new versions of whichever OS's are chosen to
run the selected control room software.

Yes. I also heard a talk once from someone who worked in the QA area
for NASA software - apart from the fact it was a very interresting
talk, NASAs software development group have a QA and documentation
protocols which are pretty amazing with what would be considered
unrealistic/unobtainable low levels of error/failure.


Auxiliary systems are often done in Windows- where the rebooting and
software chaos doesn't interfere with operations. Around here the
build, test and CM systems very often use Linux, developer workstations
use Windows frequently and a suprisingly high number use OS X. Linux is
a common choice for the "infrastructure" machines since there are no
onerous licensing issues, it runs on commodity hardware and the support
contract racket is mature enough to be useful and the toolchains are all
more or less GNU-based anyhow. It used to be Solaris owned this market
and its still common but new development labs tend to spec Linux these
days. The sofware tool vendors have really fallen down on the job
though- they obsess over click and drool Windows interfaces & more or
less useless XML silliness and don't focus on good integration of
heterogenous systems- which is where the tough problems are.

So its quite reasonable for a commercial laptop to be running Windows on
the ISS- but all it'll be doing is running some experiment or monitoring
something- or maybe just web browsing or email.

Flight systems are usually on a realtime OS with flight heritage-
vxWorks, RTEMS, LynxOS sort of thing. Linux as a serious flight OS is
still a few years away, if Linus Torvalds had made realtime performance
a priority a few years ago it might already be extensively used for
that. Being able to develop, debug, test and fly with the same OS &
hardware is a huge and often unobtainable advantage- Linux will be a big
help when its finally ready.

I suspect Linux, like the commercial *unixs is not great with real
time needs. To what extent faster hardware has made this possible I'm
not sure, but certainly from a "traditional" standpoint, Unix has
never been considered a good choice for a real time critical system.

Tim


--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
.

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