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

[fpclist at silvermono.co.za]

Hi Graeme

You have a point.

About two months ago, I had to visit the dentist because one of my filings was 
playing up. The diagnosis was that an old silver filing was leaking and 
needed to be replaced. Becase of all the hype about mercury poisoning caused 
by silver filings (which from my knowledge silver filings contains basically 
silver nitrate), the dentist suggested using an inlay which is made of some 
composite plastic etc.

I agreed and a mobile PC on wheels was rolled in by his nurse. I noticed the 
familiar green start button on the bottom left corner of the screen and asked 
what version of Windows XP this box was running. The dentist's reply was that 
this was a special version of windows specifically designed to run medical 
related critical software. Not being an offensive character, I gave him the 
benefit of the doubt. While he was attempting to start the 'tooth profiling' 
program, he clicked on a tab on the taskbar and up popped MS Solitare! 
Obviously this medical box was trying to pay for itself in more ways than its 
intended use.

To cut a long story short, during the three dimensional scan of my tooth, the 
Windows box blue screened. After a reboot, it worked fine until the tooth 
inlay cutting process, where the program controls a milling machine. The 
milling process takes close to half an hour to complete, and half way through 
the milling process, yes you guessed it, the controlling program crashed in 
Windows. I remarked that the inlay would now be useless, but the dentist's 
reply was "no, it's okay, it happens quite often. Just can't restart the 
program or the milling will stop".

When I peeked at the back of the Windows box, I was quite surprised to find a 
Siemens logo!

Also, a few weeks later, my inlayed tooth required a root treatment.

IMO, A good programmer using FPC and Linux will produce a more stable product 
than the same programmer using anything (MSVS, Delphi, DotNet, whatever) and 
running in Windows. By the way, I have nothing against MS or Windows. I think 
that MS has done a pretty good job since NT4, mostly thanks to Dave Cutler 
and his team (ex Digital VMS OS architect - is that why NT was more stable 
than 95, cause it's based on Unix?). Apart from poorly written software, 
poorly written device driver are the major cause of Windows OS crashes. Of 
course viruses and trojans etc don't help either.

Anyway, In my opinion and experience, I think that Free Pascal is suitable for 
mission critical work and yes the system as a whole must comply. The OS, the 
hardware the software. Redundancy must also be factured in. Most embedded 
device have a hardware watchdog that will reset the device when required.

Signing off,
Nino

//-------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Saturday 09 May 2009 10:08:50 Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 12:24 AM, "Vinzent Höfler"
>
> <JeLlyFish.software at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Actually, you should answer one simple question for yourself: If your
> > life really depended on the system, would you still trust it?
>
> In that case we should all be very worried. Many critical systems out
> there run on Windows - we as technical people know that Windows is not
> the most stable platform out there.  :-)
>
> The basic question is: Can we fully trust computers?  NO - but we have
> to unfortunately. Computers are built up of many components. We have
> no idea how well those components have been tested and simply have to
> trust that sufficient testing has been applied. The software compiler
> is just one of those many components.
>
>
> Regards,
>   - Graeme -
>
>
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