The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]

I’m sure I’m idealizing it, but at least I’m not demonizing it like folks did back in the day.

Are you sure? I cannot even find Ada in [0].

I tried modifying some Hello World example in Ada some weeks ago, and I cannot say that I liked the syntax. Some features were neat. I had some trouble with figuring out building and organizing files. Like C++, and unlike Rust I think, there are multiple source file types, like how C++ has header files. I also had trouble with some flags, but I was trying to use some experimental features, so I think that part was on me.

[0]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/solutions/products/ddci-developer-suite...

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

What is true, is that those vendors, and many others, like UNIX vendors that used to have Ada compilers like Sun, paying for Ada compilers was extra, while C and C++ were already there on the UNIX developers SKU (a tradition that Sun started, having various UNIX SKUs).

So schools and many folks found easier to just buy a C or C++ compiler, than an Ada one, with its price tags.

Something that has helped Ada is the great work done by Ada Core, even if a few love hating them. They are the major sponsor for ISO work, and spreading Ada knowledge on the open source community.

Your mention of STL makes it sound like you're talking about C++. But I don't know of any C++ compiler that lets you completely avoid use of the stack, even if you disable the usual suspects (RTTI and exceptions). Sure, you'd have to avoid local variables, defined within a function's body (or at block scope), but that's nowhere near enough.

* The compiler would need to statically allocate space for every function's parameters and return address. That's actually how early compilers did work, but today it would be inefficient because there are surely so many functions defined in a program's binary compared to the number being executed at any given time. (Edit: I suppose you already need the actual code for those functions, so maybe allocating room for their parameters is not so bad.)

* It would also mean that recursion would not work, even mutual recursion (so you'd need runtime checks because this would be hard to detect at compile/link time), although I suspect this is less of a problem than it sounds, but I'm not aware of a C++ compiler that supports it.

* You'd also need to avoid creating any temporary variables at all e.g. y = a + b + c would not be allowed if a,b,c are non-trivial types. (y = a + b would be OK because the temporary could be constructed directly into y's footprint, or stored temporarily in the return space of the relevant operator+(), which again would be statically allocated).

Is that really what you meant? I suspect not, but without all that your point about avoiding the stack doesn't make any sense.

This seems like a rather manual way to go about things for which an automated solution can be devised. Such as create special ECC memory where you also account for entire cell failure with Reed-Solomon coding or some boot process which blacklists bad cells etc.

Where do you place the variables then? as global variables? and how do you detect if a memory cell has gone bad?

> If every variable has a fixed address, and one of those addresses goes bad, a patch can be loaded to move that address and the mission can continue.

You can and do put the stack and heap pool at fixed memory ranges, so you can always do this. I'm not sold at all with this reasoning.

In fact, not using a default (the else clause equivalent) is ideal if you can explicitly cover all cases, because then if the possibilities expand (say a new value in an enum) you’ll be annoyed by the compiler to cover the new case, which might otherwise slip by.

    allocation/deallocation from/to the free store (heap) 
    shall not occur after initialization.

Notably this document is from 2005. So that's after C++ was standardized but before their second bite of that particular cherry and twenty years before its author, Bjarne Stroustrup suddenly decides after years of insisting that C++ dialects are a terrible idea and will never be endorsed by the language committee, that in fact dialects (now named "profiles") are the magic ingredient to fix the festering problems with the language.

While Laurie's video is fun, I too am sceptical about the value of style guides, which is what these are. "TABS shall be avoided" or "Letters in function names shall be lowercase" isn't because somebody's aeroplane fell out of the sky - it's due to using a style Bjarne doesn't like.

    (void) a;

While maybe 10% of rules are sensible, these sensible rules also tend to be blindingly obvious, or at least table stakes on embedded systems (e.g. don't try to allocate on a system which probably doesn't have a full libc in the first place).

    _ = a;

There are many areas of software where bureaucracy requires MISRA compliance, but that aren't really safety-critical. The code is a hot mess. There are other areas that require MISRA compliance and the domain is actually safety-critical (e.g. automotive software). Here, the saving grace is (1) low complexity of each CPU's codebase and (2) extensive testing.

To people who want actual safety, security, portability, I tell them to learn from examples set by the Linux kernel, SQLite, OpenSSL, FFMpeg, etc. Modern linters (even free ones) are actually valuable compared to MISRA compliance checkers.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4658076

[2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:646de5ba-eee8-4ec8...

    (void) a;

Honestly I think that's probably the correct way to write high reliability code.

Reference counting is another critical component of GLib's memory management, particularly for objects. The GObject system, which is GLib's object system for C, uses reference counting to manage object lifetimes. Every object has a reference count starting at one when created. When you want to keep a reference to an object, you call g_object_ref. When you are done with it, you call g_object_unref. When the reference count reaches zero, the object is automatically destroyed. This is the same model used by shared_ptr in C++ or reference counting in Python, but implemented in pure C.

This also integrates with the autoptr system. Many GLib types are reference counted, and their cleanup functions simply decrement the reference count. This means you can declare a local variable with g_autoptr, the reference count stays positive while you use it, and when the variable goes out of scope the reference is automatically released. If you were the last holder of that reference, the object is freed. If other parts of the code still hold references, the object stays alive. This solves the resource sharing problem that makes manual memory management so difficult in C.

GLib also provides memory pools through GMemChunk and the newer slice allocator, though the slice allocator is being phased out in favor of standard malloc since modern allocators have improved significantly. The concept was to reduce allocation overhead and fragmentation for programs that allocate many small objects of the same size. You create a pool for objects of a specific size and then allocate from that pool quickly without going through the general purpose allocator. When you are done with all objects from that pool, you can destroy the entire pool at once. This pattern shows up in many high-performance C programs but GLib provided it as a reusable component.

The error handling story in GLib deserves special attention because it demonstrates how automatic cleanup enables better error handling patterns. The GError type is a structure that carries error information including a domain, a code, and a message. Functions that can fail take a GError double pointer as their last parameter. If the function succeeds, it returns true or a valid value and leaves the error NULL. If it fails, it returns false or NULL and allocates a GError with details about what went wrong. The calling code checks the return value and if there was an error, examines the GError for details.

The critical part is that GError is automatically freed when declared with g_autoptr. You can write a function that calls ten different operations, each of which might set an error, and you can check each one and return early if something fails, and the error is automatically freed on all code paths. You never leak the error message string, never double-free it, never forget to free it. This is a massive improvement over traditional C error handling where you either ignore errors or write incredibly tedious cleanup code with goto statements jumping to labels at the end of the function.

The GNOME developers could have switched to C++ or Rust or any modern language, but instead they invested in making C excellent at what C is good at. They added just enough infrastructure to eliminate the common pitfalls without fundamentally changing the language. A C programmer can read GLib code and understand it immediately because it is still just C. The auto macros are syntactic sugar over a compiler attribute, not a new language feature requiring a custom compiler.

This philosophy aligns pretty well with what the F-35 programmers want: the performance and predictability of C with the safety of automatic resource management. No hidden allocations, no virtual dispatch overhead, no exception unwinding cost, no template instantiation bloat. Just deterministic cleanup that happens exactly when you expect it to happen because it is tied to lexical scope, which is something you can see by reading the code.

I found it sort of surprising that the solution to modern C was not a new language or a massive departure from traditional practices. The cleanup attribute has been in GCC since 2003. Reference counting has been around forever. The innovation was putting these pieces together in a coherent system that feels natural to use and composes well.

Sometimes the right tool is not the newest or most fashionable one, but the one that solves your actual problem with the least additional complexity. GLib proves you can have that feature in C, today, with compilers that have been stable for decades, without giving up the simplicity and predictability that makes C valuable in the first place.

The evidence for this claim was found in testing for the F35 where it was dog fighting a older F16. The results of the test where that the F35 won almost every scenario except one where a lightweight fitted F16 was teleported directed behind a F35 weighed down by heavy missiles and won the fight. This one loss has spawned hundreds of articles about how the F35 is junk that can't dogfight.

In the end the F35 has a lot of fancy features that are not optional for modern operations. The jet has now found enough buyers across the west for economies of scale to kick in and the cost is about ~80 million each which is cheaper than retrofitting stealth and sensors onto other air frames like what you get with the F15-EX

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter_Mafia

Definitely not a failure.

There have been over 1,200 F-35s built so far, with new ones being built at a rate of about 150 per year. For comparison, that’s nearly as many F-35s built per year as F-22s were built ever, and 1,200 is a large amount for a modern jet fighter. The extremely successful F-15 has seen about that many built since it first entered production over 50 years ago.

That doesn’t mean it must be good, but it’s a strong indicator. Especially since the US isn’t the only customer. Many other countries want it too. Some are shying away from it now, but only for political reasons because the US is no longer seen as a reliable supplier.

In terms of actual capabilities, it’s the best fighter jet out there save for the F-22, which was far more expensive and is no longer being made. It’s relatively cheap, comparable in cost to alternatives like the Gripen or Rafale while being much more capable.

There have been a lot of articles out there about how terrible it is. These fall into a few different categories:

* Reasonable critiques of its high development costs, overruns, and delays, baselessly extrapolated to “it’s bad.”

* Teething problems extrapolated to “it’s terrible” as if these things never get fixed.

* Analyses of outcomes from exercises that misunderstand the purpose and design of exercises. You might see that, say, an F-35 lost against an F-16 in some mock fights. But they’re not going to set up a lot of exercises where the F-35 and F-16 have a realistic engagement. The result of such an exercise would be that the F-16 gets shot out of the sky without ever knowing the F-35 was there. This is uninformative and a waste of time and money. So such a matchup will be done with restrictions that actually make it useful. This might end up in a dogfight, where the F-16 is legitimately superior. This then gets reported as “F-35 worse than F-16,” ignoring the fact that a real situation would have the F-35 victorious long before a dogfight could occur.

* Completely legitimate arguments that fighter jets are last century’s weapons, that drones and missiles are the future, and the F-35 is like the most advanced battleship in 1941: useful, powerful, but rapidly becoming obsolete. This may be true, but if it is, it only means the F-35 wasn’t the right thing to focus on, not that it’s a failure. The aircraft carrier was the decisive weapon of the Pacific war but that didn’t make the Iowa class battleships a failure.

Anyhow, a fair assessment is the program has gone massively over timeline and budget, so in that sense is a failure, however the resulting aircraft is very clearly the best in its class both in absolute capability and value.

Going forward there's broad awareness in the government that the program management mistakes of the F-35 program cannot be repeated. There's a general consensus that 3 decade long development projects just won't be relevant in a world where drone concepts and similar are evolving rapidly on a year by year basis. There's also awareness the government needs to act more as the integrator that owns the project to avoid lock in issues.

Criticism is fair however: they did probably extend themselves too far with the helmet technology, and I do have concerns about touch screens in cockpits (a touch screen requires you to take your eyes off of a target to move your hand to the right location, rather than locating a button by touch).

I haven’t heard anything particularly bad about the software effort, other than the difficulties they had making the VR/AR helmet work (the component never made it to production afaik).

Right now it is also the single most advance combat airplane, built in any number, which exists anywhere in the world and guarantees that the USA will be able to convincingly assert air dominance in any conflict.

Ok, joking aside: If it is considered a failure, what 100B+ military programme has not been considered a failure?

In my totally unqualified opinion, the best cost performance fighter jet in the world is the Saab JAS 39 Gripen. It is very cheap to buy and operate, and has pretty good capabilities. It's a good option for militaries that don't have the infinite money glitch.

Yes, I have done this. By the way, these measurements of course have to be part of the certification.

At least before we had zero-cost exceptions. These days, I suspect the HFT crowd is back to counting microseconds or milliseconds as trades are being done smarter, not faster.

In C++, which supports both, exceptions are commonly disabled at compile-time for systems code. This is pretty idiomatic, I've never worked on a C++ code base that used exceptions. On the other hand, high-level non-systems C++ code may use exceptions.

The rule is likely speaking to this code.

It is "C++", but we also follow the same standards. Static memory allocation, no exceptions, no recursion. We don't use templates. We barely use inheritance. It's more like C with classes.

I feel like that's the way to go since you don't obscure control flow. I have also been considered adding assertions like TigerBeetle does

https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...

The idea of `become` is to signal "I believe this can be tail recursive" and then the compiler is either going to agree and deliver the optimized machine code, or disagree and your program won't compile, so in neither case have you introduced a stack overflow.

Rust's Drop mechanism throws a small spanner into this, in principle if every function foo makes a Goose, and then in most cases calls foo again, we shouldn't Drop each Goose until the functions return, which is too late, that's now our tail instead of the call. So the `become` feature AIUI will spot this, and Drop that Goose early (or refuse to compile) to support the optimization.

> no recursion

Does this actually mean no recursion or does it just mean to limit stack use? Because processing a tree, for example, is recursive even if you use an array, for example, instead of the stack to keep track of your progress. The real trick is limiting memory consumption, which requires limiting input size.