Exploring the software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
The article is a bit light on technical details, but the following is noteworthy:> Flight software for rockets at SpaceX is structured around the concept of a control cycle. “You read all of your inputs: sensors that we read in through an ADC, packets from the network, data from an IMU, updates from a star tracker or guidance sensor, commands from the ground,” explains Gerding. “You do some processing of those to determine your state, like where you are in the world or the status of the life support system. That determines your outputs – you write those, wait until the next tick of the clock, and then do the whole thing over again.”Wow, sounds an awful lot like a typical event loop from a game engine.Of course the main difference from a game engine would be the reliability requirements. The level of verification effort that goes into flight control software can't be comparable with the effort that goes into a game engine (assuming it's greater than zero :))