Sometimes, eg aspects of automotive functional safety, MISRA C might be all you get. These NASA principles are more about enabling better possible static analy

Sometimes, eg aspects of automotive functional safety, MISRA C might be all you get. These NASA principles are more about enabling better possible static analysis of the code and ease of someone else, maybe decades later, debugging or pushing changes to something likely on another planet. Also you have to remember space based computing lags well behind terrestrial computing because of the radiation hardening. They are often still dealing with legacy systems that might be 8 bit with very limited memory, they were still in the hardware expensive engineers cheap mode until well into the nineties, if not later. Rad750s run at 400 mips and were, and maybe are, preferred choice of processor.