Bulldozer00's Blog

The figure below depicts a scenario where two targets are just about to penetrate the air space covered by a surveillance radar.

The next sequence of snapshots illustrates the targets entering, traversing, and exiting the coverage volume.

Assume that the surveillance volume is represented in software as a dynamically changing, in-memory database of target objects. On system startup, the database is initialized as empty. During operation, targets are inserted, updated, and deleted in response to changes that occur in the “real” world.

The figure below models each target’s behavior as a state transition diagram (STD). The point to note is that a target in a radar application is stateful and mutable. Regardless of what functional language purists say about statefulness and mutability being evil, they occur naturally in the radar application domain.

Note that the STD also indicates that the application domain requires garbage collection (GC) in the form of deallocation of target memory when a detection hasn’t been received within X seconds of the target’s prior update.

Since the system must operate in real-time to be useful, we’d prefer that the target memory be deleted as soon as the real target it represents exits the surveillance volume. We’d prefer the GC to be under the direct, local, control of the programmer and not according to the whims of an underlying, centralized, virtual machine whose GC kicks it whenever it feels like it.

With these domain-specific attributes in mind, C++ seems like the best programming language fit for real-time radar domain applications. The right tool for the job, no? If you disagree, please state your case.