Question: what do you normally use C/C++ for in your field of work?

anon answered on 6 Nov 2020: last edited 6 Nov 2020 12:48 pm

Generally I use C/C++ for any software development where performance is critical. Currently there are ~20,000 trackable objects in the US space catalogue. I develop models to assess collision probabilities between these objects. At each time step in the simulations that we run, the state vector of all of these satellites has to propagated in time and a collision algorithm has to be computed to calculate collision probabilities. Typically we will also run lots of simulations (Monte-Carlo runs) to account for unknowns in certain variables. As you can probably imagine this is quite computationally expensive so by utilizing compiled languages like C++ we can get the most bang for our buck in terms of performance. We also utilize distributed/parallel computing architectures where we split computations across multiple nodes and do parallel processing within each node. This is pretty straightforward to do with C++ libraries like OpenMP and MPI.