Comparing Ada and High Integrity C++
I have often suspected that use of a safety critical or high integrity coding standard for C++ would yield a level of safety and software reliability approximately equivalent to using Ada with no restrictions. I have documented a comparison of the High Integrity C++ Coding Standard (HIC) produced by PRQA with standard Ada language features. I was mostly correct in my suspicions. There are some rules in the HIC which apply equally well to Ada, such as a prohibition against the use of the goto statement. In many instances the HIC rules require a non-trivial amount of code development and verification, while the Ada solution is trivial. For instance, achieving object initialization in C++ requires the use of carefully implemented constructors, while specifying default initialization for Ada records is relatively trivial. Another example is C++ multi-threading. The HIC lists several rules for the use of locks, mutexes, and condition variables. For Ada, the built-in facilities of task Re...