> NASA's Power of Ten — Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code will change the way you code forever. To expand:
* https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...
"For fairly pragmatic reasons, then, our coding rules primarily target C and attempt to optimize our ability to more thoroughly check the reliability of critical applications written in C."
A version of this document targeting, say, Ada would look quite different.
4.2.4 Consolidate Resource Allocations
It is generally recommended to consolidate resource allocations to the application initialization function(s). Allocations and setup of resources such as memory pools and child tasks should happen once during initialization in order to provide more determinism during run time.
The ESA Ada standard also recommends all allocation occur at initialization, and requires exceptions to be justified.
The rules are written with the historical context of C making it too easy to leak heap-allocated memory. In the safety-critical Rust code that I've worked on, we tend not to dynamically allocate due to the usual constraints, and we're well aware of the "thou shalt not allocate" rules in the scripture, but we've already gotten clearance from the relevant certification authorities that Rust is exempt from the restriction against dynamic allocation specifically because of its ownership system.