alt Hacker NewsYou raise a good point. No trolling: I wonder what languages they seriously considered? Example: I am sure the analysis included C in the mix. Also, I wonder if they considered compiler extensions. Example: Since C doesn't have destructors, maybe you could add a compiler extension to add the defer keyword to allow people to schedule object destruction. Even when they decided upon C++, I am sure there was a small holy war to decide what features were allowed. When they started the JSF programmed in the 1990s, C++ compilers were pretty terrible!
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riku_iki • last Sunday at 11:24 PM
My recollection is that traditionally they used Ada for avionics, but per some internet claims they had difficulties to hire enough Ada programmers for such large projects, so switched to C++.
Ada and C++ were the only realistic options at the time, and Ada developers are difficult to hire.
But honestly, with this sort of programming the language distinctions matter less. As the guide shows you restrict yourself to a subset of the language where distinctions between languages aren't as meaningful. Basically everything runs out of statically allocated global variables and arrays. Don't have to worry about fragmentation and garbage collection if there's no allocation at all. Basically remove any source of variability in execution possible.
So really you could do this in any c style language that gives you control over the memory layout.