The Language of Autonomous Driver Assistance Systems

As I’ve done more work on autonomous driver assistance system (ADAS) components — on topics such as computer vision, localization, and controls — one topic that keeps popping up is the prevalence of C++ and, to a lesser extent, Python.

This is in some ways a stop backward, because I have worked in Ruby for the last five years, and Ruby is a powerful and concise language, especially with the Rails libraries layered on top of it.

Getting something done in C++ is considerably more verbose and open to bugs.

That said, C++ is fast. All of the beauty of Ruby comes at the cost of processes running behind the scenes to facilitate the beauty of the code. Garbage collectors, dynamic memory allocation, code compilation — all of those things take time.

In a car, time is crucial, far more so than on the web. So C++ it is.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on January 25, 2016.