Coming from C/C++ background, I am aware of coding standards that apply for Safety Critical applications (like the classic trio Medical-Automotive-Aerospace) in the context of embedded systems , such as MISRA, SEI CERT, Barr etc.
Skipping the question if it should or if it is applicable as a language, I want to create Python applications for embedded systems that -even vaguely- follow some safety standard, but couldn’t find any by searching, except from generic Python coding standards (like PEP8)
Is there a Python coding guideline that specificallly apply to safety-critical systems ?
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Answer
Top layer safety standards for “functional safety” like IEC 61508 (industrial), ISO 26262 (automotive) or DO-178 (aerospace) etc come with a software part (for example IEC 61508-3), where they list a number of suitable programming languages. These are exclusively old languages proven in use for a long time, where all flaws and poorly-defined behavior is regarded as well-known and execution can be regarded as predictable.
In practice, for the highest safety levels it means that you are pretty much restricted to C with safe subset (MISRA C) or Ada with safe subset (SPARK). A bunch of other old languages like Modula-2, Pascal and Fortran are also mentioned, but the tool support for these in the context of modern safety MCUs is non-existent. As is support for Python for such MCUs.
Languages like Python and C++ are not even mentioned for the lowest safety levels, so between the lines they are dismissed as entirely unsuitable. Even less so than pure assembler, which is actually mentioned as something that may used for the lower safety levels.