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Which is more complex - car or an operating system?
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daqq:
Hi guys,

There has been a philosophical discussion here as to which is more complicated - a modern car or a modern operating system (let's go with Windows)? I know that 'complicated' is not an exactly measurable quantity, but I'd say you can compare two items.

My guess would be that an operating system needs to be more complex and will have to account for more complicated interactions, whether or not it's within itself or with the outside world. At tens of millions of lines of code for itself, it has to play nice with itself as well as third party stuff, while at the same time maintaining compatibility with a load of historical baggage. Add to that the demand that it runs usably on pretty much anything from an ancient brick with buttons all the way up to an overpowered workstation that 20 years ago would have been categorized as a supercomputer with dozens of cores... and with hundreds of new security issues popping up every year... add to that needing to deal with third party software and hardware bugs... adding new features and hardware support on the fly...

In terms of the amount of developers needed, I read somewhere that the Windows 7 group had around 10k developers working on it. I'm not sure as to the veracity of the information, but sounds in the right ballpark. I've no clue as to how many people are needed to design, say, a Tesla or a WV car.

What's your opinion?

Thanks,

David
RoGeorge:
Modern cars have at least one operating system, plus many other systems, so car is more complex than an operating system.   :-//
Q.E.D.
greenpossum:
Wife :-DD
Rerouter:
Cars and trucks usually have less total software complexity, but that is somewhat required to still be able to review and test for edge cases, its one of the few industries where its not easy to "just patch it after release"

Each module is very built for purpose, meaning there is not much generalized code, take a normal ECU, most times the ROM image is in the ballpark of 256MB or less,

The main horrible mess of complexity can be found in the "infotainment" system, e.g. the radio and all the other crap that gets packed in there, more often than not they literally run on linux, and are bodge upon bodge upon bodge, but as certain parts will be stripped down for size, likely puts it at less than a fully featured OS.

Think of it like everything but the radio is usually akin to a large microprocessor written with embedded code, the radio is like a raspberry pi with enough hats to scrape the ceiling.
artag:
Yes.

Sorry. Absurd question. We have no reasonable way to measure complexity in a consistent way across disciplnes, so the question is as meaningless. Apples and Oranges, as we say.
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