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.
bri3d|2 months ago
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).
jandrewrogers|2 months ago
These days they are even more comfortable using C++ than they were back then due to improvements in process, tooling, and language.