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

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327 points AareyBaba | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 18:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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exDM69 ◴[08 Dec 25 11:24 UTC] No.46191046[source]▶
> If the DoD enforces the requirement for Ada, Universities, job training centers, and companies will follow

DoD did enforce a requirement for Ada but universities and others did not follow.

The JSF C++ guidelines were created for circumventing the DoD Ada mandate (as discussed in the video).

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p_l ◴[08 Dec 25 15:15 UTC] No.46193153[source]▶
TL;DR Ada programmers were more expensive
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adolph ◴[08 Dec 25 15:50 UTC] No.46193686[source]▶
Since when was expense a problem for defense spending?

In the video, the narrator also claims that Ada compilers were expensive and thus students were dissuaded from trying it out. However, in researching this comment I founds that the Gnat project has been around since the early 90s. Maybe it wasn't complete enough until much later and maybe potential students of the time weren't using GNU?

  The GNAT project started in 1992 when the United States Air Force awarded New 
  York University (NYU) a contract to build a free compiler for Ada to help 
  with the Ada 9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract 
  required the use of the GNU GPL for all development, and assigned the 
  copyright to the Free Software Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAT
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1. 0xffff2 ◴[08 Dec 25 18:41 UTC] No.46196002[source]▶
Take a look at job adds for major defense contractors in jurisdictions that require salary disclosure. Wherever all that defense money is going, it's not engineering salaries. I'm a non-DoD government contractor and even I scoff at the salary ranges that Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup post, which often feature an upper bound substantially lower than my current salary while the job requires an invasive security clearance (my current job doesn't). And my compensation pales in comparison to what the top tech companies pay.