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

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.

> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.

What is the evidence for this? Companies selling Ada products would almost certainly agree, since they have a horse in the race. Ada does not automatically lead to better, more robust, safer or fully correct software.

Your line of argument is dangerous and dishonest, as real life regrettably shows.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]

> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]

I can think of two reasons. First, achieving the same level of correctness could be cheaper using a better language. And second, you have to assume that your testing is not 100% correct and complete either. I think starting from a better baseline can only be helpful.

That said, I have never used formal verification tools for C or C++. Maybe they make up for the deficiencies of the language.

If Ada was "better" than C++, why did Ada not perform much better than C++, both in regards to safety and correctness (Ariane 5), and commercially regarding its niche and also generally? Lots of companies out there could have gotten a great competitive edge with a "better" programming language. Why did the free market not pick Ada?

You could then argue that C++ had free compilers, but that should have been counter-weighed somewhat by the Ada mandate. Why did businesses not pick up Ada?

Rust is much more popular than Ada, at least outside Ada's niche. Some of that is organic, for instance arguably due to Rust's nice pattern matching and modules and crates. And some of that is inorganic, like how Rust evangelists through force, threats[0], harassment[1] and organized and paid media spam force Rust.

I also tried Ada some time ago, trying to write a tiny example, and it seemed worse than C++ in some regards. Though I only spent a few hours or so on it.

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292

> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.

> Linus

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