Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[Jerry]

You can find these words


Safer Skies
The Federal Aviation Administration is using Julia to develop the Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

at this link

https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/lincoln-labs.html.

Do they plan to field a final product in Julia? The article is unclear on this point.

Jerry

Re: Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On 2020-04-08 06:45, Jerry wrote:
> You can find these words
> 
> Safer Skies
> The Federal Aviation Administration is using Julia to develop the Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System
> 
> at this link
> 
> https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/lincoln-labs.html.
> 
> Do they plan to field a final product in Julia? The article is unclear on this point.

Jets do not fly anymore. So why not? (:-))

P.S. I made Ada bindings to Julia, for I wished to try it as an 
alternative to Python for scripting.

Unfortunately I could not use Julia bindings beyond rudimentary tests, 
because Julia builds are incompatible with MinGW. If you have some 
third-party libraries in C they will collide with Julia's C run-time.

And Julia cannot be built from sources under MSYS either. Apparently it 
could be some years ago, but then they broke something and it does not 
work anymore. It's serious avionics stuff... (:-))

Furthermore Julia does not have loadable modules one could 
recompile/load once and call multiple times without compiling them each 
time. I would not try to use it in a medium to large size system 
regardless the language qualities, which are not brilliant either.

All in one, an obvious candidate for safer skies...

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

On 4/8/2020 1:57 AM, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> All in one, an obvious candidate for safer skies...
> 

There is a trend going on in software engineering for the last 30 years.

Languages that are weak on typing (no typing at all, Duck typing,
loose typing, dynamic typing, etc...) are getting very popular
and languages that have strong static type checking which allows
more error to be detected at compile time, are being ignored
and are less popular with the masses.

Go figures

--Nasser

Re: Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[J-P. Rosen]

Le 08/04/2020 à 23:51, Nasser M. Abbasi a écrit :
> There is a trend going on in software engineering for the last 30 years.
> 
> Languages that are weak on typing (no typing at all, Duck typing,
> loose typing, dynamic typing, etc...) are getting very popular
> and languages that have strong static type checking which allows
> more error to be detected at compile time, are being ignored
> and are less popular with the masses.
> 
> Go figures
> 
I'd even say that the trend is for ease of writing rather than ease of
reading/maintaining. Well, software engineering is not the only domain
where advertising for long term benefit against immediate gain is
difficult and unpopular...

-- 
J-P. Rosen
Adalog
2 rue du Docteur Lombard, 92441 Issy-les-Moulineaux CEDEX
Tel: +33 1 45 29 21 52, Fax: +33 1 45 29 25 00
http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[Stéphane Rivière]

> I'd even say that the trend is for ease of writing rather than ease of
> reading/maintaining. Well, software engineering is not the only domain
> where advertising for long term benefit against immediate gain is
> difficult and unpopular...

+1 We can not say it better.

(Joke) Can we deduce that Italians bridges* are 'programmed' with duct
typing languages ?

* One more today, a 300 m long one, only one injured, no dead, 'thanks'
to containment.

-- 
Be Seeing You
Number Six

Re: Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[AdaMagica]

Am Donnerstag, 9. April 2020 07:44:55 UTC+2 schrieb J-P. Rosen:
> I'd even say that the trend is for ease of writing rather than ease of
> reading/maintaining. Well, software engineering

Would you really call this SE?

> is not the only domain
> where advertising for long term benefit against immediate gain is
> difficult and unpopular...

“When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada!”
Robert Dewar

Re: Julia for Next-Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System

[Optikos]

On Thursday, April 9, 2020 at 10:23:56 AM UTC-5, AdaMagica wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 9. April 2020 07:44:55 UTC+2 schrieb J-P. Rosen:
> > I'd even say that the trend is for ease of writing rather than ease of
> > reading/maintaining. Well, software engineering
> 
> Would you really call this SE?

No, it isn't software engineering of large systems.  But mere talk of evangelism or of brow-beating shaming like what we in the Ada community have been doing for decades isn't winning the war and hasn't been winning very many major battles in recent years.

Instead, what could be done as an entirely different more-aggressive strategy to expose nonAda languages' problems more directly?  I am thinking something along the lines of what white-hat security researchers do to expose security vulnerabilities:  Ada white-hats exposing the vulns of nonAda software, contrasting exposed Julia weak spots in isolation with strength in Ada or Ada+SPARK replacements in isolation.

> > is not the only domain
> > where advertising for long term benefit against immediate gain is
> > difficult and unpopular...
> 
> “When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across.
> If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much
> more interested in Ada!”
> Robert Dewar

There is really flying in the physical airplane.  And then there is simulating midair collisions of airplanes at fully-stressed-system scale in perfect-storm misbehaviors of Julia-based air-traffic-control software.  (Think what perfect-storm combination of situations must have occurred to trigger the Toyota crashes several years ago; use that analysis-technique thinking against Julia.)

Electrical engineering sets up labs with test jigs that stress the digital hardware in attempts at perfect-storm combinations of situations that must all be handled well without, say, excessive inductance, crosstalk, noise, heat, EMI, and so forth in the analog domain.  Ada community needs to set up a Julia test jig and an Ada test jig to compare them in controlled quite-harsh situations.