MISRA C: Learn About the Motor Industry's Programming Language Guidelines

MISRA?(the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association) provides guidelines for developing safety- and security-related electronic systems, embedded control systems, software-intensive applications, and standalone software.

MISRA is a collaborative effort among vehicle manufacturers, component suppliers, and engineering consultancies. It is managed by a Steering Committee that includes Ford Motor Company, Bentley Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, HORIBA MIRA, ZF TRW, and the University of Leeds.?

The most prominent of MISRA guidelines are for projects developed using the C and?C++ programming languages. These include MISRA C 2004, MISRA C++ 2008, and MISRA C 2012 standards.

Though born in the automotive industry, MISRA has gained acceptance in other markets such as aerospace, biomedical, and financial. It is accepted across embedded,?IoT, and industrial control systems as well.

Many of the most serious bugs in C arise from undefined behavior, such as:

• Buffer overruns and underruns
• Invalid pointer direction
• Double close
• Data races
• Division by zero
• Use of uninitialized memory

MISRA C recommends the use of an automated static analysis tool to find violations of the standard. But keep in mind that all tools are not created equal, however, and some can only reason about superficial syntactic properties of the code. More advanced tools have deep semantic knowledge of the entire program.

Although MISRA C is not a style guide, numerous rules also promote the writing of clear, readable maintainable code. This is very beneficial, as code that is straightforward to understand is much less likely to harbor subtle bugs or undefined behavior.

Want to learn more? Tonex offers MISRA-C Training, a two-day course designed for C programmers, engineers and managers working on safety-critical applications?for automotive, medical, military, aerospace, avionics, or other life-critical applications.

Additionally, MISRA-C training covers the MISRA C:2012 guidelines to ensure safe coding practices can be achieved efficiently.?

For more information, questions, comments, contact us.