Ada was mandated by the DoD for a bit. My understanding is that, in practice, this involved making a half-hearted effort in Ada, failing and then applying for a variance to not use Ada.
I actually met a programmer who worked on military jets. According to her, Ada is only used anymore for the older jets that were already programmed in it, and she worked in C++.
No need to be so dramatic. Shitheads will make software fail in any language. Memory "safety" will not help you correctly and in timely manner calculate position of flight controls for example.
One can write reliable, and I mean airtight good enough for medical devices and nuclear deterrence, in basically any even vaguely modern language (think Algol-60 or later). It’s simply a matter of disciplined design and running on hardware that’s sufficiently predictable.
Most aerospace stuff is. The thing is, they have reams of very specific rules about how it's coded, how to verify that code, and how to verify the compiler of that code, and how to verify the code output from that compiler. It's not an easy process to replace, but its proven reliable just by all the commercial planes flying every day without falling out of the sky.
In theory, something like Rust could do the job instead, but they'd still have to verify the entire chain. Rust is for the rest of us to get something half as reliable as that while also being able to write more than two lines of code per day.
Often, I'm sure, but there are large code bases in Ada still. It's a shame, it looks like a really great language I would love. But it's a chicken and egg problem. If only Mozilla had decided on Ada instead of Rust! :-)
