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I took a tour of one of the factories where the F-35 is built (or one of the components of the airframe). It is the one located in Atlanta, Georgia. The scale o
by bliti 13y ago
I took a tour of one of the factories where the F-35 is built (or one of the components of the airframe). It is the one located in Atlanta, Georgia. The scale of the place is just mind-numbing. There was a row of C-130 in different stages of assembly and next to them the production line for the their wings.
On the F-35 side, there was this huge robot that looked like a flat toolbox. It moved the airframe part from one station to the next. Just amazing. The whole assembly line looks like something out of a movie.
I was told that the F-35 had a lot of C++ code, and that is the reason it was not meeting deadlines. It was an interesting bit of gossip to hear, but I'm not entirely sure how that would come into play. I'm also not sure if C++ has been used before in this type of application. Given how ingrained Ada, C, and Fortran are in the industry.
- fus 13y agoIn the topic of C++ in industry: SpaceX is using C++ successfully in a similar type of application.
- vonmoltke 13y agoAda is dead for new development by fiat of the DoD. They finally figured out that having all their real-time code written in a language almost nobody outside of DoD uses is a bad idea. Fortran doesn't fly; that is, (almost)[1] no real-time code is written in Fortran. It is still used for simulations, but is steadily being replaced my Matlab since the latter integrates better with various engineering workflows. C is definitely still the winner for the embedded code, but is losing to C++ as time goes on. Java is also making inroads for implementing the interfaces on operator consoles. [1] I know of at least one program that deployed signal processing algorithms in a semi-operational state in Fortran.