10 Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code

Gerard Holzmann's Ten Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code specifies rules for developing safety critical code in C, rules that improve software reliability and testability. More detailed descriptions can be found in the June 2006 Issue of IEEE Computer, which can be found here. For me, there are other programming languages out there who may be better suited for safety-critical (and real-time) systems, languages like Ada or Erlang. I believe that one important aspect of such systems is to make sure that the routines invoked will take a deterministic amount of time to complete.