101–110 of 160 posts
I’m really curious what language the telemetry data is written in. Does anyone know what the historically preferred language is?
No idea for SpaceX, but a lot of commercial avionics run code written in Ada.
Other references say parts of Falcon9 and Dragon a version of Unix calLed VxWorks from Charles River. It is realtime (not virtual) and predates Linux. NASA uses it in a lot of its space probes because its been debugged for 33 years. That doesnt means its perfect. The two 2003 Mars rovers experienced a bug in the then-newfangled flash memory driver. It was successfully fixed and reloaded from Earth. https://en.wikiped…
https://blogs.windriver.com/wind_river_blog/2019/09/vxworks-...
This damn snake can be compiled on anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if everyone on earth was as productive as those 35 people.
It reminds me of this olognion piece: https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridi... That's not just hilarious, that's also pretty close to how I feel most of the time. I mean, some people have built the Airbus A380. On the other hand, last week, I created a test DB with the user "test" and the password "test". I couldn't connect to it, and after a long debugging session, noticed I misspelled "test".…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Javascript is a great language for building UIs I disagree. It is easy to build something presentable with HTML and browsers, and there have been many JS frameworks that lower the barrier. However, that is not because JS is a good language for it; it is because JS is the only language available in that environment. In fact, there are at least two other languages that transpile to JS, because you need JS to be able…
You haven’t made any arguments about why Javascript isn’t good for building UIs there. Here’s mine for why it is: - first class functions (callback style is a good fit for UI programming) - async/await and single threaded - many components of UIs are async by nature, Javascript supports you well here while keeping things simple with its single threaded model
The Flight Software team is about 35 people. We write all the code for Falcon 9, Grasshopper, and Dragon applications; and do the core platform work, also on those vehicles; we also write simulation software; test the flight code; write the communications and analysis software, deployed in our ground stations. We also work in Mission Control to support active missions.
Imagine if everyone on earth was as productive as those 35 people.
Other references say parts of Falcon9 and Dragon a version of Unix calLed VxWorks from Charles River. It is realtime (not virtual) and predates Linux. NASA uses it in a lot of its space probes because its been debugged for 33 years. That doesnt means its perfect. The two 2003 Mars rovers experienced a bug in the then-newfangled flash memory driver. It was successfully fixed and reloaded from Earth. https://en.wikiped…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if everyone on earth was as productive as those 35 people.
It reminds me of this olognion piece: https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridi... That's not just hilarious, that's also pretty close to how I feel most of the time. I mean, some people have built the Airbus A380. On the other hand, last week, I created a test DB with the user "test" and the password "test". I couldn't connect to it, and after a long debugging session, noticed I misspelled "test".…
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-01-mn-17288...
So, don’t feel too bad...
Knowing that the ground control software is written in LabView is one of the more disappointing things I've read recently. I did a bunch of test engineering during co-ops during college, including multiple "codebases" of LabView, plus the normal class coursework and research lab instrumentation. I hate LabView, to the degree that I made a commitment never to apply to a job that has it's use as one of the requirements…
It sounds like you hate LabVIEW because you worked on a few poorly architected systems, as I don't see anything in your hate for it that actually applies to LabVIEW the language/environment.
> If you're not working it essentially full-time, on the same codebase, it's insanely difficult to maintain any non-trivial code.
It's hard to maintain any codebase if you're not giving it attention. I would argue that LabVIEW, when properly architected, can be maintained just fine and maybe even easier than other languages. I've done it.
LabVIEW is highly performant and excels at throwing data around and processing it and interacting with hardware. Its dataflow nature actually makes it easy to modify and maintain, when done properly. There aren't many languages that make it that easy to make user interfaces and distributed systems. Another language/ecosystem that I would consider for such a system is Elixir/Erlang, but you'll be searching for a user interface solution and lots of hardware drivers. However, with Elixir/Erlang you gain a system even more built for distribution but you lose out a lot on synchronous/sequential performance. C#/F#/.NET are other options to use since NI makes quite a lot of .NET drivers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if everyone on earth was as productive as those 35 people.
It reminds me of this olognion piece: https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridi... That's not just hilarious, that's also pretty close to how I feel most of the time. I mean, some people have built the Airbus A380. On the other hand, last week, I created a test DB with the user "test" and the password "test". I couldn't connect to it, and after a long debugging session, noticed I misspelled "test".…