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The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]

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327 points AareyBaba | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 18:07 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bri3d ◴[07 Dec 25 22:19 UTC] No.46185823[source]▶
https://web.archive.org/web/20111219004314/http://journal.th... (referenced, at least tangentially, in the video) is a piece from the engineering lead which does a great job discussing Why C++. The short summary is "they couldn't find enough people to write Ada, and even if they could, they also couldn't find enough Ada middleware and toolchain."

I actually think Ada would be an easier sell today than it was back then. It seems to me that the software field overall has become more open to a wider variety of languages and concepts, and knowing Ada wouldn't be perceived as widely as career pidgeonholing today. Plus, Ada is having a bit of a resurgence with stuff like NVidia picking SPARK.

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ecshafer ◴[08 Dec 25 05:43 UTC] No.46188799[source]▶
I've always strongly disliked this argument of not enough X programmers. If the DoD enforces the requirement for Ada, Universities, job training centers, and companies will follow. People can learn new languages. And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
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lallysingh ◴[08 Dec 25 10:24 UTC] No.46190651[source]▶
No they won't. DoD is small compared to the rest of the software market. You get better quality and lower cost with COTS than with custom solutions, unless you spend a crap ton. The labor market for software's no different.

Everyone likes to crap on C++ because it's (a) popular and (b) tries to make everyone happy with a ton of different paradigms built-in. But you can program nearly any system with it more scalably than anything else.

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1. bmitc ◴[08 Dec 25 15:50 UTC] No.46193691[source]▶
> more scalably than anything else

That's quite debatable. C++ is well known to scale poorly.

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2. lallysingh ◴[10 Dec 25 18:08 UTC] No.46221163[source]▶
Yet the largest codebases I know of are either C, Fortran, or C++. Who's doing anything really big (in terms of LOC) in another language?
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3. bmitc ◴[10 Dec 25 18:50 UTC] No.46221797[source]▶
C/C++ basically demand that codebases be large. And we hear all the time about software troubles written in these languages. Finding reports of this are almost endless.

I think people who write complex applications in more sane languages end up not having to write millions of lines of code that no one actually understands. The sane languages are more concise and don't require massive hurdles to try and bake in saftey into the codebase. Safety is baked into the language itself.