Object-oriented-no panacea for safety

In recent safety analyses of embedded computer software we observed that "object oriented" does not necessarily imply safety. In fact, several aspects of widely practiced object oriented software development techniques can lead to decidedly unsafe software characteristics. Two principal sources of potentially unsafe software are identified: control over object and method visibility; and concurrency. Popular object oriented design approaches and programming languages appear weak in one or both of these areas. Verifying the safety of software designed with inadequate visibility control and poorly orchestrated concurrency was exceedingly difficult.