[technion]

This is a tangent, but Wikipedia says this about that chip:

    The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif.

Am I alone in the concern that in a safety critical environment, the phrase "low cost" should be more of a concern than the choice of language?

[randomacct44]

Totally not :) Just for reference, I'm not actually planning to build a safety-critical device with an ESP8266.

What piqued my curiosity was this project:

http://openaps.org

It's basically a homebrew controller implementation that uses data from a continuous blood glucose monitor to talk to an insulin pump. They're using Node and JavaScript from what I can tell from the GitHub. They're obviously conservative for safety concerns. The code runs on a Raspberry Pi 3.

This got me wondering - what language WOULD be used in 2016 to code something safety-critical? Is there anything coming from research that's better than C? My initial thoughts were something like Elixir, but really anything strongly type-checked and verifiable. Rust was another thought I had.

Looking at this my immediate thought was also "what's the tiniest micro that could do this job instead of the power-hungry Pi?".

I guess everything is C or assembler in the end anyway :) The impression I get from these responses is that a restricted subset of plain C seems to be the most practical solution today.

EDIT: I'm the OP if it isn't obvious, different account.

[technion]

Thanks for the clarification.

I had a look around and I can only guess that the extensive hard limits that they document in their design fulfil the safety requirements on their own.