

This Car Runs on Code (100 million lines of it) - timf
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb09/7649

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timf
From the article, kind of amazing:

\- "The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force
frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code."

\- "The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010,
will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems."

\- "And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in
2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its
avionics and onboard support systems."

\- "These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-
class automobile recently, 'it probably contains close to 100 million lines of
software code'"

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jacquesm
After reading this I'm going to be so much more happy that my car starts in
the morning... I wonder how much of that code is 'critical', in other words,
if it should fail that it would lead to loss of a vehicle or plane (including
the occupants and/or bystanders).

I do wonder about those line counts though, that seems suspiciously high,
especially given the fact that automotive processors are usually not very
powerful. The majority is in the 'pic/atmel/name your flavour of embedded cpu'
range.

~~~
parbo
The ECU I'm developing now uses a Freescale PPC-5516 running at 66 MHz. That's
kind of a mid-range processor for automotive now. I would estimate that it
will run ~ 1 million LOC at start of production. C and C++, some small startup
code in assembly.

~~~
jacquesm
what on earth do you need a million lines for ? That's a fair bit of code by
any standard, and from where I'm sitting an ECU is a control system with a
relatively limited number of input channels controlling an even more limited
number of outputs.

Where does all that code go to ?

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timf
I like this part, regarding "100 million lines of code":

 _"Such complexity brings with it reliability issues."_

I can't even imagine.

