> In 2013 I was working in nuclear power plant automation ... the job required reading a lot of assembly code.
Does anyone else find this terrifying? Nuclear power plant automation should be done in the safest of the safe languages. I would be alarmed at the thought of stuff like this being written in C, never mind in assembly!
Not really. There are plenty of chips out there without even a C compiler. Some don't even support Turing Completeness. There's even more that were designed and installed before manufacturers started slapping C compilers together for their DSPs, FPGAs, and MCUs.
It would be weird to care about memory safety when your board doesn't even have a heap!
Systems like that tend to be designed with different kinds of safeties. A mildly silly example - your typical Rails app doesn't have a watchdog timer, your toaster probably does.
Yes he said reading assembly, not writing. Whatever they use, I'm glad that someone's having a glance at what the compiler spits out. Also could be talking about microcontrollers, and in an industrial setting PLCs wouldn't be unexpected.
Does anyone else find this terrifying? Nuclear power plant automation should be done in the safest of the safe languages. I would be alarmed at the thought of stuff like this being written in C, never mind in assembly!