This is insteresting to me especially since this is a 2005 document. Is there a reason why C++ was chosen instead of Ada which to my knowledge was the gold standard for such software ?
A large segment in this article (which is great overall) focuses on this decision. The short summary is "hiring Ada developers was hard and middleware and tooling were difficult to acquire."
While I've moved through a lot of parts of the software industry and may just be out of touch, I actually feel that this may be less the case today. I've seen a lot of school programs focus less on specific languages and frameworks and more on fundamental concepts, and with more "esoteric" languages becoming popular in the mainstream, I actually think hiring Ada developers would be a lot easier today (plus, big industry players like NVIDIA are back to using Ada since AdaCore have been so effective at pushing SPARK, which probably helps too).
My recollection is that it came down to two factors. Pragmatically, the pool of highly skilled C++ programmers was vastly larger and the ecosystem was much more vibrant, so development scaled more easily and had a lower maintenance risk. By 2005 they had empirical evidence that it was possible, albeit more difficult, to build high-reliability software in C++ as the language and tooling matured.
These days they are even more comfortable using C++ than they were back then due to improvements in process, tooling, and language.
> 4.10.9 Inheritance
Class hierarchies are appropriate when run-time selection of implementation is required. If run-time resolution is not required, template parameterization should be considered (templates are better-behaved and faster than virtual functions). Finally, simple independent concepts should be expressed as concrete types. The method selected to express the solution should be commensurate with the complexity of the problem.
I’m a TS + Java person. Is this specific to C++ or is it just due to control freaks with low abstraction skills?
You should see some of the manuals I go through for our some of IoT devices. As far as how Lockheed Martin does it, this quote from the article linked by bri3d answers it:
> MISRA-C was used as the basis for the C applications and a coding standards was developed with the assistance of Bjarne Stroustrup, original author of the C++ language. For both C and C++ Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools are used to ensure that restricted features are not utilized. Arguments about the lack of reliability in either C or C++ are addressed by programming standards restrictions and SCA checks. In truth, this approach is probably more consistent and robust than the manual checks used for previous development efforts including Ada.
Alright that makes far more sense than doing it the "bureaucratic" way. Non-compliant doesn't compile. Must be really annoying working on this codebase hah.
Readit News
A large segment in this article (which is great overall) focuses on this decision. The short summary is "hiring Ada developers was hard and middleware and tooling were difficult to acquire."
While I've moved through a lot of parts of the software industry and may just be out of touch, I actually feel that this may be less the case today. I've seen a lot of school programs focus less on specific languages and frameworks and more on fundamental concepts, and with more "esoteric" languages becoming popular in the mainstream, I actually think hiring Ada developers would be a lot easier today (plus, big industry players like NVIDIA are back to using Ada since AdaCore have been so effective at pushing SPARK, which probably helps too).
These days they are even more comfortable using C++ than they were back then due to improvements in process, tooling, and language.
I’m a TS + Java person. Is this specific to C++ or is it just due to control freaks with low abstraction skills?
> MISRA-C was used as the basis for the C applications and a coding standards was developed with the assistance of Bjarne Stroustrup, original author of the C++ language. For both C and C++ Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools are used to ensure that restricted features are not utilized. Arguments about the lack of reliability in either C or C++ are addressed by programming standards restrictions and SCA checks. In truth, this approach is probably more consistent and robust than the manual checks used for previous development efforts including Ada.