C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte

This person is unhinged.

> It's a desktop on a Linux distro meant to create devices to better/save lives.

If you are creating life critical medical devices you should not be using linux.

> If you are creating life critical medical devices you should not be using linux.

Hmm, what do you mean?

Like, no you should not adopt some buggy or untested distro, instead choose each component carefully and disable all un-needed updates...

But that beats working on an unstable, randomly and capriciously deprecated and broken OS (windows/mac over the years), that you can perform zero practical review, casual or otherwise, legal or otherwise, and that insists upon updating and further breaking itself at regular intervals...

Unless you mean to talk maybe about some microkernel with a very simple graphical UI, which, sure yes, much less complexity...

I mean you should be building life critical medical devices on top of an operating system like QNX or vxworks which are much more stable and simpler.

Regulations are complex, but not every medical device or part of it is "life critical". There are plenty of regulated medical devices floating around running Linux, often based on Yocto. There is some debate in the industry about the particulars of this SOUP (software of unknown provenance) in general, but the mere idea of Linux in a medical device is old news and isn't crackpot or anything.

The goal for this guy seems to be a Linux distro primarily to serve as a reproducible dev environment that must include his own in-progress EDT editor clone, but can include others as long as they're not vim or use Qt. Ironically Qt closed-source targets vxWorks and QNX. Dräger ventilators use it for their frontend.

https://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-techn...

Like the general idea of a medical device linux distros (for both dev host and targets) is not a bad one. But the thinking and execution in this case is totally derailed due to outsized and unfocused reactions to details that don't matter (ancient IRS tax computers), QtQuick having some growing pains over a decade ago, personal hatred of vim, conflating a hatred of Agile with CI/CD.

> You can't use non-typesafe junk when lives are on the line.

Their words, not mine. If lives are on the line you probably shouldn’t be using linux in your medical device. And I hope my life never depends on a medical device running linux.