To help the embedded systems industry create safer products, Barr Group has made the downloadable version of its Embedded C Coding Standard available to the public free of charge. This offering comes in response to potentially disturbing results published in the 2017 Embedded Systems Safety & Security Survey. That survey revealed that approximately one in five designers of Internet-connected products that could kill or injure a person are failing to follow or enforce safety-related coding standards during software development.
“The survey results point to a pressing need for the wider adoption of safety-related best practices,” said Barr Group co-founder and CTO Michael Barr. “Any reasonably complex piece of software will have bugs, but there are practical and inexpensive ways to keep bugs out and thereby make products safer for consumers. Among these best practices are the adoption and enforcement of bug-killing coding rules like those in the Embedded C Coding Standard. By following these rules, engineering design teams can significantly reduce the number of bugs in their systems and thereby dramatically increase the safety of those products.”
Barr Group’s Embedded C Coding Standard is among the industry’s most popular coding standards. “We hope that by offering the document free of charge, even more embedded systems engineers will use it to make safer products,” said Barr Group CEO Andrew Girson.
The rules of the Barr Group coding standard are intentionally compatible with and complementary to the stricter MISRA-C Guidelines for the Use of the C Language in Critical Systems. This gives companies the option to adopt the Embedded C Coding Standard by itself or combine it with the MISRA-C guidelines. The Embedded C coding standard is also easy to adopt and includes stylistic rules that improve code readability that are not provided by MISRA-C.
Free digital copies of the Embedded C Coding Standard are available on the Internet. Print copies can be purchased on the Barr Group website and on Amazon.com. For teams that want to create a custom version of the standard, an editable Microsoft Word .DOC file is also available for license.
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