I wonder if it's a recent rewrite. My GlobalProtect on PAN-OS 11.0 is unusable after 11.0.2 with the entire company unable to connect. The latest release presumably fixed it, but Linux clients still unable to get a stable connection.
i share your pain. in my 20+ yrs working on enterprise infrastructure, i have never come across a more garbage product on so many levels on so many platforms at the same time as GlobalProtect.
It's still mostly C, with bits of Python, Go, and other common languages sprinkled around, plus more esoteric things for the platforms with ASICs or other specialized hardware.
It's just that I work in an adjacent area. It's not so much a question of security but of legacy, history, and performance. When Palo Alto was founded, 2005, I think C/C++ would basically be the only choice for these sorts of quasi-embedded/realtime high performance security applications. Then once you've built some sort of ecosystem around a certain technology introducing new technologies becomes harder.
Yes, I was imagining something like this for the "too new" alternative.
In 2005 you did already have safer, capable, mature systems programming languages available, eg Ocaml, but for cultural reasons they were not often used in SV. And people were less educated about building secure software (goes double for enterprise security products).