MISRA C and its applicability to automatic code generation

摘要

MISRA C is a widely used coding standard in the automotive industry. With the advent of production-quality code generators, the question of applicability of the MISRA C standard arises. The standard was written for software engineers to avoid common coding mistakes. The potential errors likely to occur in machine-generated code are not necessarily the same. The article discusses the conflicting areas of complete compliance with a standard, the usefulness of its rules and the cost of adhering to these rules. The latter is backed by some up-to-date benchmarks conducted with the production code generator TargetLink from dSPACE. The example of TargetLink shows particularly that adherence to most of the rules is possible, though exceptions are advisable to maintain code efficiency without compromising safety.