Re: [boost] Use of boost in safety critical work

Subject: Re: [boost] Use of boost in safety critical work
From: Andrew Marlow (marlow.agents_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-12-06 09:31:16

Thank you all for your comments so far.

On 6 December 2014 at 13:46, Edward Diener <eldiener_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> My last consulting job was for a company essentially doing "safety
> critical work" ( they were periodically inspected/checked by the FDA ).
> They felt that Microsoft's MFC and VC++ standard libraries were "safe" but
> I could not convince them that using Boost libraries were "safe". They were
> upset when they found bug reports against some Boost libraries, but
> evidently were not at all upset when I conversely pointed out bug reports
> against MFC and the VC++ compiler.

This is what I suspect the company attitude will be in my particular case.
I am not really interested to hear stories about well established, widely
used and respected boost is. I already know that. As far as I am concerned
boost is the next best thing to it coming from the std library and in many
cases boost work has gone on to become part of the std. However, company
attitudes differ. In my case the company hasn't even heard of boost so it
is definately SOUP as far as they are concerned. So I was wondering how
widespread this phenomenon is in safety critical circles and how seasoned
boost-aware developers deal with it. As someone else has already said,
boost code is not very readable which casts doubt on being able to use it
to simulate having developed the code in-house from scratch. So what do
people do instead?

-- 
Regards,
Andrew Marlow
http://www.andrewpetermarlow.co.uk