In this aerospace company, we use C, no C++ allowed, to avoid all the extra footguns that get in the way of safety and certification. Rust will probably be the next choice on the scene, but I expect it'll take as long to come as Ada took to go.
In this aerospace company, we use C, and sometimes a subset of C++ that is basically C+epsilon. That's all new, however, so each new project that goes that direction is walking a dark forest.
We've got some Rust on the ISS, but honestly, the interest from the serious FSW folks isn't there.
> Rust will probably be the next choice on the scene
I'm not sure about it.
I think Rust might be hard to certify for aerospace usage.
Not because it's bad, but because it's still complex. Just a lot of negative side effects of complexity are contained due to the compiler checks and design.
But that makes it harder to certify as I can tell.
Ada relied on colleges teaching it or Pascal, so then it became hard to hire. I understand the rationale behind this, but the language is surprisingly easy to learn because it's usually explicit and straightforward.
It suffered from two decades of bad press due to being forced by the DoD and then almost two decades of no press. Looking at Google ngrams, C (due to Unix) took big chunks out of it and then Java gave the death blow by becoming a major teaching language. Ada 2012 had the capability to do for Ada what C++11 did for C++, but it wasn't sold well.
I picked up Ada 2012 last year and made a tool I use everyday now for real work--it's not a bad language. It suffers from a lot of myths about it, but the tool modernization like getting a package manager makes it productive. It is "boring" in the sense that there's nothing flashy about it, and its surface verboseness which saves other code later, and lack of curly braces turns people off. The community is super small and nice, but it never learned to sell the benefits of the language.
I only have limited experience, but I’ve seen projects migrate from Ada to C++ more often than the other way around. If I had to guess why, it’s probably because it’s easier to hire for.
