Python for air traffic control?

[Will Ware]

Grant Edwards (grante at visi.com) wrote:
> If this were a simple, hard-realtime system with response time
> requirements in the milliseconds, I'd stay away from Python,
> away from C++, and away from dynamic memory allocation.
> However, with response time requirements in the hundreds of
> milliseconds and a problem domain that probably requires
> dynamic memory allocation I think Python would be suitable.

In a case like this you could perhaps take the RT-Linux approach, which
runs Linux as a low-priority task in a RTOS. The high priority
things can be device drivers, special interrupt handlers, etc. It should
probably be possible to do something similar with Python as a low priority
task on a RTOS. In fact one could just install Python on an RT-Linux
system and you'd have it. The fast stuff would need to be coded in C
or assembler, but it's unlikely to need dynamic memory allocation. Having
Linux available might allow you to place a bound on the memory used by
Python, assuming you wanted to do that.

-- 
-----------------------------------+---------------------
 22nd century: Esperanto, geodesic | Will Ware
 domes, hovercrafts, metric system | wware at world.std.com