by Roy Murdock, with Steve Hoffenberg, and Chris Rommel, June 2016
VDC has observed a slow but steady move away from low-level and/or specialized languages, such as assembly and Ada, across the entire embedded landscape. Some verticals, such as consumer electronics and retail automation, are migrating faster than others are, but the last bastions of safety-critical software are no longer safe from the upward consolidation. This view aims to quantify the transition toward higher-level languages within the aerospace and defense industry, and to provide context and color around the ever-contentious debate: can C and C++ serve as reliable tools for programming some of the world's most important, safety-critical systems?