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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if Tesla would use something like this for certain parts of the car. But you just know they won’t. Love to hear if anyone knows of any formal methods are used at all, and not talking about the self driving stack, but stuff like throttle control.

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Relevance??

If all you think about is Tesla, every comment thread is a relevant place to post.

Not usually in the habit of giving much thought to Tesla, but suggesting that a proven correct C compiler created by a company that builds transportation devices that contain lots of computers might be interesting for another company that builds transportation devices that use lots of computers seems to me to be perfectly sensible.

Especially since that other company has a bit of a reputation for writing shoddy software.

In fact, the more I think about the more relevant this comment becomes. Building computerized transportation devices is hard and apparently one of the things you need to do it well is a proven correct C compiler. A far cry from the type of software development most people do, which involves slapping together some stuff we found on the internet and writing some glue code around it.

Ada/Spark is also supposed to be pretty good here.

I was like, since when does Airbnb build transportation devices?

Oh.

Nevermind.

Cars are similar to planes in that they're very complex electric/mechanical machines. They have lots of code where if it is done poorly (Toyota spaghetti code acceleration nightmare) people could be seriously injured or even die. Tesla isn't the only car company, but has a pretty strong fan base. The poster is just generalizing the OP to car software. Seems relevant to me.

Seems weird to wish a car company would use a specific technique when you don't know if they already do this or not and they're not known to have any problems caused by not doing it.

Someone else commented in this sub thread that Tesla is known for some poor software, so maybe he/she is assuming they don't use the best possible practices.

I know nothing of Tesla though and have no plans of buying one anytime soon. Still seems pretty relevant to me though if you don't take every topic to be so narrowly defined.

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