Comment by pixelesque

12 hours ago

DDS sort of took over from CORBA in the military domain, and the statically-typed IDL was still quite similar to CORBA last time I looked at it, so that takes you back to around 1998 when CORBA was being used a lot in the military in my experience.

What other protocols and systems were you thinking of that can provide (depending on broker) hard-realtime delivery that can be used in safety-critical systems?

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pixelesque

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ls612  11 hours ago

Stupid question, but why didn’t the DOD mandate IP compatibility for literally all comms like 20+ years ago? Is it pure corruption/incompetence or is there a good reason?

  • openasocket  10 hours ago

    A lot of military comms are point-to-point or broadcast between radios where TCP/IP doesn’t really make sense. On top of that, you need to understand how much legacy military networking stuff is out there. This stuff long predates the internet. We had tactical data links and target tracking where a ground station could receive a target info from a remote radar array, and automatically direct fighters on autopilot on an intercept course with enemy contacts in like 1960 (see SAGE as an example). These systems have been around for decades and been continually improved on. There’s a lot of inertia to maintain compatibility. Because you really don’t want someone to die because your ally tried to warn you but their tactical data link isn’t compatible with yours.

  • aidenn0  10 hours ago

    The DOD effectively can't "just mandate" things and it's because of politics (which is a superset of corruption and incompetence).

    There's a very small number of major contractors and if you pick one of their APIs as the new standard, then you disadvantage all the others.

    If you pick a greenfield project, then it will take a long time, and once you are done everybody will claim that they can't use it (see e.g. Ada; quick version they started working on a mandate for a programming language in 1975, mandated Ada in 1991 and by 1996 removed the Ada mandate).