[c++] Compiling an application for use in highly radioactive environments

What could help you is a watchdog. Watchdogs were used extensively in industrial computing in the 1980s. Hardware failures were much more common then - another answer also refers to that period.

A watchdog is a combined hardware/software feature. The hardware is a simple counter that counts down from a number (say 1023) to zero. TTL or other logic could be used.

The software has been designed as such that one routine monitors the correct operation of all essential systems. If this routine completes correctly = finds the computer running fine, it sets the counter back to 1023.

The overall design is so that under normal circumstances, the software prevents that the hardware counter will reach zero. In case the counter reaches zero, the hardware of the counter performs its one-and-only task and resets the entire system. From a counter perspective, zero equals 1024 and the counter continues counting down again.

This watchdog ensures that the attached computer is restarted in a many, many cases of failure. I must admit that I'm not familiar with hardware that is able to perform such a function on today's computers. Interfaces to external hardware are now a lot more complex than they used to be.

An inherent disadvantage of the watchdog is that the system is not available from the time it fails until the watchdog counter reaches zero + reboot time. While that time is generally much shorter than any external or human intervention, the supported equipment will need to be able to proceed without computer control for that timeframe.

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Compiling an application for use in highly radioactive environments