Does anyone know if Lua has been certified to run on an airframe or road vehicle? Certification processes such as DO178B (RTCA) or standardization such as ISO 26262 (Road vehicles).
Certification is like case law and I would feel more confident evaluating the language knowing that another company has successfully made it through a process.
I'm betting no because of GC and dynamic features, but I thought I'd throw the question to the crowd anyway. Cheers.
DO178 Level D would be doubtful and higher would be impossible. The Lua VM uses lots of dynamic memory allocation. For Level A you need to show source to object code tracability. I don't see you doing that in Lua.
Also there is no ready made tools for everything you need. Doing everything yourself is not really an option once you realise all the work required on level C or higher. Using recognized tools with ready certification packs makes it a lot easier. Is there any statement and branch coverage tools for Lua? Is this tool qualified?
As you said certification is like case law and authorities know C and is not going to question anything if you use C. As soon as you use anything else you are opening yourself up for all kinds of questions about interpretation and implementation.
I would love to use Ruby on a aircraft but I know it is not going to happen.
Not exactly what you asked for, but this can give you an idea of what to expect: Esterel Technologies justified the use of OCaml for the latest version of Scade, which is a code generator used in certified environments.
Note that it was not about having a language with dynamic allocation run inside the vehicle! OCaml had to be qualified as the code generator for the code generator!
If I had to summarize the article in one sentence, it would be "it was a lot of work".