In performing an assessment of which ecosystem and PL to use to develop our high-integrity …

In performing an assessment of which ecosystem and PL to use to develop our high-integrity automation software for mission-critical applications, we assessed Rust, Zig, and Ada/SPARK. Rust had the support behind it from a big corp., a passionate developer community, and some adoption by significant entities, but none with cyber-physical systems. And it has been interesting to see some developers leaving Rust for Zig for the sheer enjoyment of using it instead. Our software will be controlling machinery overhead and other close coupling with machinery and people. Rust does not have the legacy in these areas or the ecosystem to cover formal verification. Zig was considered, but was even more new than Rust, and had similar disadvantages as listed for Rust. SPARK, a relatively newer PL, a subset of Ada, has legacy in high-integrity, mission-critical applications, and formal verification tooling that along with human review, makes it the strongest choice to meet the government's latest push for such critical software, and the language though verbose, is low friction to learn and apply. …