Many developers has already heard about the Ariane5 bug , it was one of the most infamous software failures in the history of aerospace engineering. It occurred on June 4, 1996, during the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket, which was intended to launch four Cluster satellites into orbit to study Earth’s magnetosphere.
The bug itself was a software issue related to the guidance system of the rocket. The software component responsible for converting a 64-bit floating-point value to a 16-bit signed integer for use in the guidance system caused an unhandled exception due to an overflow error. So finally one line of code costs millions of dollars and make the Ariane 5 launch is widely acknowledged as one of the most expensive software failures in history.
But in the other side do you know which line of code worth million of dollars?
Continue reading “The single C++ line that is worth millions of dollars.”