EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Solid Sands

By Marcel Beemster, CTO, Solid Sands

Expect the use of the C++ standard library to increase for safety-critical applications in 2024

Marcel Beemster

What major technological advancements or innovations do you foresee occurring in your industry in 2024, and how do you plan to adapt or lead in these areas? What key market trends do you expect to see?

We expect there will be many more companies focusing on the safety of critical C++ applications – especially in sectors such as industrial, automotive, rail, medical, robotics, and aviation. There has never been a greater requirement for a well-developed programming language that emulates the performance levels of C whilst offering a superior degree of abstraction. This is because increasing numbers of safety-critical applications in 2024 will involve working with real-time data that is generated by many different types of sensors.

To get the best out of C++, a qualified C++ library is absolutely essential in safety-critical applications. Library qualification is important because code from the library is connected to the application and installed on the target device.

There are a number of factors that combine to drive the technology and enable its wider usage.

On the hardware side, for example, there are economical low-power processors with sufficient performance and memory to run C++ reliably. Battery technology is continually improving and this creates the opportunity for greater levels of mobility. These, in turn, enable new and complex applications to be developed in transport, personal assistance, entertainment, safekeeping, energy and many other areas. A range of real-time imaging tools supplements the technology that is available in these applications.

On the software side, C++ is an extended version of C that preserves C’s essential attributes – namely, portability, speed, and the predictability of its resource usage. On top of that, it defines the C++ standard library, which is vastly more capable (and much larger) than its C counterpart. It also provides more type safety, which enables a programming language to avoid type errors. This is a highly desirable feature in mission-critical applications that may not be easy to update in the field. Beyond C++’s standard library are other libraries for image processing and enhancing user interfaces as well as the user’s experience when programming.

In terms of market trends, as new application areas that benefit from greater mobility are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, they become safety-critical, and this is when it’s necessary to qualify the C++ standard library according to a functional safety standard.

Solid Sands has a long history of verifying C and C++ implementations. Indeed, the oldest test in our test suite celebrates its 40^th birthday this year! Since the creation of that initial test, many other tests have been added – hand-written and generated – to support the latest language updates. With the company’s SuperGuard product, which is being expanded for C++, the market will have a solution to qualify the specific part of the C++ standard library that they are using.

The core set of SuperGuard for C++ supports qualification for a collection of headers in the C++ standard library. The core set can be extended with additional headers, which Solid Sands is actively developing.

About Author:

Marcel Beemster is a professional in compiler technology with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam. From 1999, he was a senior software engineer at ACE, managing a wide range of compiler development projects. Since early 2013, his focus has shifted to the support, maintenance, and development of the SuperTest compiler test and validation suite for C and C++. Marcel co-founded Solid Sands in 2014 in order to put his full attention to C and C++ validation and its application in safety-critical application development.

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2024 at 12:28 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.