alt Hacker NewsNo, AUTOSAR is a flaming pile of shit. What good ideas did AUTOSAR have? Reusable software components? That is the idea every single software engineer or computer scientist had ever, it is completely unusable and I have never, ever seen a MISRA C compliant anything if it is generated by AUTOSAR (well, unless you count a deviation list longer than the ARXML used to generate the crap).
"AUTOSAR is a good idea, it works in theory", nope, much like communism if your theory does not work and continues to fall flat on its face it is a terrible theory. No one would say a theory of gravity that predicted you would turn into a unicorn if your really wanted to and dropped a ball at the same time had merits.
Here is an idea to make the automotive industry slightly better, just an incremental improvement. DBC files are used to specify CAN interfaces, they allow big endian and little endian messages within THE SAME MESSAGE, which is madness. Why not pick an endianess, just one, it does not matter which, do not make things generic (I have nightmares of German mechanical engineers writing software saying the word "generic"). Do that an you have actually achieved something. I am not even suggesting specifying what messages numbers do what, or what signals they contain for a particular ECU (which would make literal components reusable). The automotive industry is riddled with bad, terrible, software.
I do not know how you blame consultants, the German automotive industry sabotaged themselves.
I have no idea how it can be used in safety critical software, because no one understands it. I guess they just test the fuck out of it.
Sorry for the poorly thought out rant...AUTOSAR makes me...emotional.
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AUTOSAR had the idea of collecting the common parts used for CARs. Your phone doesn't need a generic library for CAN, but cars do. Reuse isn't a new idea, but the idea of doing it for common car specific code is new - it is an obvious idea whose time has come, but still new for this specific application.
Then consultants got involved and made it into the garbage it is. The ideas themself were sound and obvious. However they over complicated it and made it into garbage even though the idea itself is sound. (over complicated as in I know experienced autosar developers who got fed up and took 1 week to rewrite in C code they had just done in autosar in 3 months!)
> Here is an idea to make the automotive industry slightly better, just an incremental improvement. DBC files are used to specify CAN interfaces, they allow big endian and little endian messages within THE SAME MESSAGE, which is madness. [...] Do that an you have actually achieved something.
What exactly? Will your proposed change make the cars more reliable? Cheaper to produce? What is the benefit?
I feel you, I really do, I've been where you are, but I've seem metastatic automotive code bases that were non-Autosar that would make you tear your eyeballs out. So, trust me, there is _worse_ than Autosar. AUTOSAR is a pain to work with, but, at least, to their credit, once you configure the goddamn' modules they do work. You don't know how, because observability sucks. But the modules work.
I agree with your point about incremental improvements. And I agree that reducing useless options would improve the status quo.