On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 06:31:17 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I thought this anonymous comment about his pacemaker example
was funny:
"I surely hope you are talking about the programmer device for
pacemakers and not the actual pacemaker inside someone's body.
I worked for Intermedics until we got bought by Guidant on
Monday and shut down on Tuesday. We had a project at that time
that was being written in C++ and it was likely the compiler
did not even have a standard year attached. I was never
comfortable with that project given the really ugly tendencies
of both compilers and software engineers to do awful things in
code. The ugly things in compilers was behind the push for
standards in both C and C++!
The actual pacemaker likely has so little memory and power that
it would be very strange to be written even in C (but more
likely after 16 years of improved technology). It is more
likely that the pacemaker code is still being written in
assembler and the whole program is likely less that a few
thousand lines.
I am confused by your assertions. It would be *very* unlikely
once a device is released to production that the compiler would
be changed to a newer version. Medical device software that is
done properly must undergo massive amounts of verification and
validation before it is released. Changing the compiler would
require that the compiler itself be exhaustively validated
against the old compiler and then the verification and
validation of the device would be required to be repeated. That
whole process would likely cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars (perhaps even a million) in engineer/clinician time to
verify that the device is still safe and effective.
It is very likely that all properly managed medical device
companies continue to use the initially validated compiler for
a *very* long time. As an example, when I worked in
arthroscopy, we used the same C compiler for our
micro-controllers for 6 years before we even entertained
updating to the very latest. And arthroscopy is not nearly as
mission critical as pacemakers.
If the company you did contract work for was not that diligent,
I would sure like to know who it is so I can tell my Dad to
decline to use that manufacturer's pacemakers."
Well, I've actually wrote some code that's running inside this
[1], a device that I think it is at least as critical as a
pacemaker...
Well, I do take the view, but the situation is not so dark as he
describe.
[1]
http://www.transenterix.com/company/corporate-news-events/video/
--
/Paolo
