[fpc-pascal] A question or two regarding the FPC

["Vinzent Höfler"]

Mattias Gaertner <nc-gaertnma at netcologne.de>:

> But I second Jonas mail: Before you run an fpc program in a
> zero-tolerance environment, you have to test a lot of things, because a
> lot of code was not written with zero-tolerance in mind.

Testing simply isn't enough. As we all should know, testing only proofs the existance of bugs, not their absence.

So, no, I wouldn't recommend FPC for mission or safety-critical applications. After all, you need a lot more than just a compiler to have some confidence about the running application.

Depending on your personal definition of "zero-tolerance", you even may need _proof_ of correctness at object code level. At that point, the compiler doesn't matter anymore. And, well... even Ada compilers have bugs, although the general confidence about the code generator might be a bit higher if they successfully passed the ACATS. ;)


Vinzent.

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