[bitwize]

No, there's no reason, as it could have been written in Ada and gotten many of the same safety guarantees as Rust provides.

[kbenson]

Given Ada's history in safety critical systems (avionics), it's actually somewhat surprising more didn't use Ada. They could have just adopted the military standard (which is fairly stringent, as I understand it). The military is pretty adverse to losing billion dollar pieces of equipment, so they probably take quite a few precautions.

[jabl]

Didn't most of the military-industrial complex drop Ada in favor of C or C++ as soon as the DoD dropped the requirement that critical software must be done in Ada?

AFAIU the JSF software is done in C++, there is (or at least used to be) some JSF coding guidelines document on Bjarne Stroustrups web page. Of course, blaming C++ for the JSF boondoggle is unfair, but still, one wonders whether it was wise of the DoD to allow C/C++...

[ArkyBeagle]

You got me as to why this is. Dude, I tried back in the day - Ada, MODULA, all those.

Maybe the "badass 'C' hax0r" meme was stronger than I realized. But I think a lot of it was just switching cost.

[naasking]

To be fair, Ada has a lot of library cruft for dynamically sized structures that you don't have to deal with in C. It can be pretty annoying.