MISRA C:2012 welcomed
26th February 2013, Nuremberg, Germany and Tamworth, England.ChrisHills, CTO of Phaedrus Systems, the specialists in tools for the development of safety-critical and high reliability embedded systems, and a member of the MISRA-C team for the last decade, has welcomed the announcement of MISRA C:2012.
“These guidelines are the ideal basis for an organisation to develop coding standards for the C programming language, as part of an integrated development process,” said Hills. “While MISRA’s heritage is the automotive industry, MISRA C is now the most widely accepted set of guidelines for C in any industry.”
MISRA C:2012 extends the guidelines beyond C90 to include C99 and also has clarified and simplified the rules of MISRA C:2004.
“The C language includes “legal but dubious constructs, ”, to quote Dennis Ritchie the father of C. These can conspire to cause behaviour you don’t want,” says Hills. “For any system, let alone safety-critical systems, this is clearly undesirable, so one task of the guidelines is to ensure that such constructs are not used.”
The changes to the guidelines were as a result of considerable user experience in a wide range of applications, and of the experience of tools companies in measuring code conformance. “One result is that many of the guidelines are decidable – that is an automated checker can say whether the guideline has been followed. Applying the guidelines and using code analysis tools greatly improves the quality of code and the productivity of developers,” says Hills. “Integrating them within a tool chain, from requirements specification through to unit testing and even tracking the different variants in deployment, provides the best way of demonstrating that a system will meet the demands of certification authorities for safety-critical applications.”
The members of the MISRA C:2012 team come from a wide range of areas, including aerospace, defence and Industrial control, reflecting the way that the guidelines have moved from automotive to almost any safety-critical application, including nuclear engineering.
“MISRA C:2012 is for anyone developing systems, but it has to be used with discernment. It is not a religion but it is the starting point for ensuring that developed code is robust and predictable.”
Notes for Editors
ChrisHills is the founder and CTO of Phaedrus Systems. He has a long term interest in C and has been involved with MISRA-C since 1998. He served on the MISRA-C2 Working Group and then on its successor for MISRA C:2012. He has been a member of the ISO/BSI C and C++ Language Panels since 1999. He was the convener of the C panel from 2000 to 2004. He sits on the IEC 61508-3 Panel and sat on the now defunct Technical Advisory Panel of the IET’s Microelectronics & Embedded Systems Network.
Phaedrus Systems Limited is the UK’s leading specialist in the support of engineers at all stages of embedded safety-critical and high-integrity projects. The company is IAR’s distributer in the UK. Other tools available include requirements capture for IEC 61508, EN 50128 and nuclear applications; requirements tracking and competency tools; estimation software; SIL3 RTOS; hi-rel embedded database; compiler validation reports and reliability/failure software. Consultants have experience working on automotive, rail and aerospace applications, meeting standards such as IEC 61508 SIL4, and D0178B. Backing these is a wide range of other relevant embedded tools.
Phaedrus Systems is based in Tamworth, Staffordshire. More information is available on the website Hills,
Tel: +44 1827 259546,
Mobile: +44 7973371558
Email:
PhaedruS SystemS Ltd Co Registered in England No: 40120771 VAT No.: 860 6218 31
Tel +44-1827 259546 Fax. +44-8700 554 622 Registered Office: 96 Brambling Tamworth staffs B77 5PG