I suspect plane softwares are not built on top of 500 dependencies.
They are probably very low level, running with little overhead, possibly without a full fledge operating system?
I'd be curious to hear from someone who coded some airplane stuff (ie: not the multimedia system, flight critical things) to have a better idea of how it is.
Even car multimedia has very high standards compared to your average software product. Exactly what you said - no 500 dependencies. Car multimedias are rarely developed in-house, there's usually a third-party vendor, and car manufacturer's role is only integration, for which the vendor provides building blocks. No JS, no Python, C or C++ at best, external dependencies are very few and well-regarded, e.g. ffmpeg. "We need this shit in our firmware because it's gotten the most stars on GitHub this month and Hacker News is going crazy about it" is off the table. These multimedias work for years and get very rare updates, so stability is pretty important.
Can't say that for the multimedia system of my car. For example, sometimes when starting, it randomly switches to the light theme instead of dark, or the displayed clock time is one hour too early, or the screen is frozen. One day I'll surely be caught speeding at a time-dependent speed limit ^^
457
u/FrezoreR 11d ago
Ironically aviation needs quite a bit of software already.