I, like many others, have been completely enamored with the recent successful landing of Mar’s Curiosity rover. After reading a couple of articles, and following a few links, I’ve found a couple C based coding standards that NASA JPL uses to formalize their code and protect it from error. (See here and here.)
This has me curious. Are there any open-source operating systems available that adhere to these coding standards that are available for common architecture, such as x86, x64 or possibly ARM?
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I don’t know of an operating system explicitly developed with the rules mentioned in mind but according to a press release by Wind River VxWorks is used as an embedded Operating System.
The great benefit of these coding rules is that they simplify the code review process and formalize the environment. Some operating systems like Linux have coding style guidelines but they typically only cover syntax and don’t have such rigid rules and they are probably not as closely reviewed as the code of NASA.
Some of the rules are also only relevant for embedded systems like no dynamic memory after initialization, or may cause problems like the need for IPC instead of functions pointers (this is especially true for operating systems).
An interesting open-source operating system is eCos as you can configure the parts of your OS, e.g. you can explicitly choose what parts you want to include in your system, POSIX compatibility, BSD sockets, TCP/IP stack…