Should the document be titled "Safety-Critical Rust Coding Guidelines"?

[rcseacord]

A little late for this, but I'm not sure I'm that crazy about the title for our project:

Safety-Critical Rust Coding Guidelines

Mostly I have a problem with the adjective "safety-critical". I used to use this term at Woven, but people kept asking me what it meant.

It seems that folks in automotive use the phrase "safety-related" instead. I think this is because of ISO 26262.

I assume it's the case that other domains use "safety-critical". This is the term I used when I worked for the US DoD, back before it became the department of war.

Here is another idea I have:

Rust Functional Safety Coding Guidelines

or

Rust Coding Functional Safety Guidelines

I might as well also point out that I've named every document of this type I've created a "Coding Standard".

I think we modelled the current name after MISRA, but it's important to remember that MISRA is wrong about practically everything.

A guideline is a general rule, principle, or piece of advice.

It's a suggestion, and not a hard and fast rule.

A mandatory guideline is an oxymoron. Required guideline is an oxymoron. Advisory guideline is redundant.

So if we are going to change the name maybe we can fix this as well:

Rust Functional Safety Coding Standard

I know the name of the group can't be changed, or at least, it would be quite difficult.

[workingjubilee]

Actually, changing the repo name should be doable by anyone with the relevant access in the rustfoundation group, and because your repo isn't referenced by a zillion external automation things, it would be good to do now, before things get too exciting and you suffer that form of "lock-in".

[PLeVasseur]

because your repo isn't referenced by a zillion external automation things, it would be good to do now, before things get too exciting and you suffer that form of "lock-in".

Oh have you suffered / benefited from that excitement before? 😆

In principle:

• I'd like the coding guidelines to grow beyond only a safety-critical focus, to support other kinds of software (e.g. game frameworks, http servers, and so on)
• For the moment, the main driver and groups that want to contribute / benefit are in safety-critical system

Hrm, tough call. 🤔

[rcseacord]

• I'd like the coding guidelines to grow beyond only a safety-critical focus, to support other kinds of software (e.g. game frameworks, http servers, and so on)

if you make things too general, they become useless.

I think for both MISRA and CERT we started in either safety/security and then tried to move into the other.

This combination makes sense to me because of the overlap and because you can't have one without the other, mostly.

[felix91gr]

I think we modelled the current name after MISRA, but it's important to remember that MISRA is wrong about practically everything.

🤣 I hope it never ceases to amuse me just how much you dislike MISRA. I'm not siding with them, and I know you're right about at least a lot of it; it just makes me laugh.

A guideline is a general rule, principle, or piece of advice.

It's a suggestion, and not a hard and fast rule.

A mandatory guideline is an oxymoron. Required guideline is an oxymoron. Advisory guideline is redundant.

Yeah, fair enough.

More than Guidelines... I'd say we're writing... a norm, standard, rules? Something like that.

In Spanish I'd call them "La norma de programación para sistemas críticos", but norma(Spanish) and norm(English) aren't necessarily perfect maps of one another. I haven't read that many Engineering normative texts in English, so I'm probably missing out on what the common words used for this are.

So if we are going to change the name maybe we can fix this as well:

Rust Functional Safety Coding Standard

Yeah, something along those lines seems quite reasonable.