It has been years since I actually was allowed (asked?) to write any production code that goes into any of Volvo vehicle, since we buy a majority of our in-vehicle software from suppliers. Besides that, most of the in-house code we do nowadays are auto-generated from Simulink and Stateflow models.
Mostly I have reviewed what others have put in our vehicles, which is not nearly as rewarding. And this usually only happens when there is a problem, usually not a bug fix but rather more complicated, like real-time scheduling or improper use or configuration of the basic (or platform) software.
Since I will take a more active part in the a project course at the IT University which uses Erlang I think I will look into that. Erlang has some features which appeals to me personally:
- Support for asynchronous parallel processing, ideal for multi-core processors
- Functional paradigm, in contrast to the dominating OO paradigm, so I need to brush up old knowledge of things I haven't used since graduating in 1993.
- Freeware from the erlang website
- Access to some experts on the language
Confession: I'm not really that skilled OO programmer either, I could probably not write a Java program if my life depended on it. I'm too old school, almost all professional programming I've done have been in C and Fortran, with some Assembler and IDL.
4 comments:
I kind of work briefly with Haskell with its subset called ATOM to allow embedded programming for a hydraulic hybrid system. The issue I found is that this implementation is ended up compiled into C code and not machine code, which made me wonder where is the advantage.
However, a year ago changed jobs and stop using haskell for embedded. Which right now I used for pc tools development. Parsers, lockups...
Nevertheless, when I red your blog, it amazed me, because it seems like Erlang was really develop with the embedded system point of view!. I am very interested in this topic and would like to learn a little bit more about this!.
Erlang is not compiled into C but is compiled and runs on an Erlang machine on top of your OS.
It is proven in use, Ericsson uses it in several telecom applications, and I have heard of embedded use in vehicles.
But it is not for all embedded systems, it is very good on soft real-time systems (like a telecom base station), but not for hard real-time.
To understand the principles of Erlang I strongly suggest reading ch. 2.1-2.5 in Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis, available at the Erlang site.
Stateflow has been updated for making it easier to create state machines and flow charts in R2012b.
The major updates include a new graphical editor, state transition tables, MATLAB as the action language and an integrated debugger. Find short videos for these features and how they can be used at:
http://www.mathworks.com/products/stateflow/whatsnew.html
~Siddharth
like to have you share some stories/information. I know my audience would value your work. If you are even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an e car dealer marketing
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