Lua usage in safety-critical systems

[Roger Leigh <rleigh@...>]

Hi folks,


I'm new to the mailing list, and would be interested to know if anyone has used Lua in any sort of safety-critical system, in particular for regulated industries such as automotive or medical.  If anyone has any examples of such use in a real product that would be really interesting and much appreciated.

For a bit of context, I'm currently investigating use of Lua in an embedded device running as a dedicated RTOS thread for high-level scripting of actions.  I have developed an initial proof of concept with several safety mitigations including a custom pool allocator and made some other small modifications to make Lua work in this constrained environment. From a purely technical perspective, everything is working very well.  However, without being aware of any precedence for Lua being used for this type of application, it is a potential regulatory risk, and so any pre-existing use of Lua for this type of situation would make it a less risky proposition.

If making the stock Lua source code work on embedded systems is of wider interest, I can potentially feed back some of the changes I've made which include:

  - disabling of all file I/O for systems without any file system or FILE streams [mainly a handful of ifdefs]
  - replacement of the random functions using clock() and time() with a hardware RNG [would weak symbols with a LUA_WEAK macro be acceptable, or should this go into Lua_State as a function pointer like for the memory allocator?]
  - replacement of some of the output/logging functions to use alternative means of logging in the absence of FILE streams (same question as for the random functions regarding weak symbols or function pointer)


Many thanks,
Roger