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High-level tools have become unavoidable in industrial software development processes. Safety-critical embedded programs don't escape this trend. In the context of safety-critical embedded systems, the development processes follow strict guidelines and requirements. The development quality assurance applies as much to the final embedded code, as to the tools themselves. The French company Esterel Technologies decided in 2006 to base its new SCADE SUITE 6 TM certifiable code generator on Objective Caml. This paper outlines how it has been challenging in the context of safety critical software development by the rigorous norms DO-178B, IEC 61508, EN 50128 and such.

High-level tools have become unavoidable in industrial software development processes. Safety-critical embedded programs don't escape this trend. In the context of safety-critical embedded systems, the development processes follow strict guidelines and requirements. The development quality assurance applies as much to the final embedded code, as to the tools themselves. The French company Esterel Technologies decided in 2006 to base its new SCADE SUITE 6 TM certifiable code generator on Objective Caml. This paper outlines how it has been challenging in the context of safety critical software development by the rigorous norms DO-178B, IEC 61508, EN 50128 and such.

International audienceThis paper presents a non-intrusive method for Objective Caml code coverage analysis. While classic methods rewrite the source code to an instrumented version that will produce traces at runtime, our approach chooses not to rewrite the source code. Instead, we use a virtual machine to monitor instructions execution and produce traces. These low-level traces are used to create a machine code coverage report. Combined with control-flow debug information, they can be analyzed to produce a source code coverage report. The purpose of this approach is to make available a method to generate code coverage analysis with the same binary for testing and for production. Our customized virtual machine respects the same semantics as the original virtual machine; one of its original aspects is that it is implemented in the Objective Caml, the very language we build the tool for.This work is part of the Coverage project, which aims to develop open source tools for safety-critical embedded applications and their code generators