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Code for Airplanes (and cars and other safety critical applications) follows a special set of rules in order to eliminate wonkiness that tends to crop up in complied programs (usually the result of undefined behavior, not always the programmers direct fault).

See: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213 (particularly part 3)

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

> I've always wondered what's different about code written for airplanes. Anybody have any insight?

You might be interested in some publicly available coding standards for the Joint Strike Fighter (C++) and the NASA JPL (C):

http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf

Ada is still under active development and widely used in applications requiring extremely reliable software.

http://www.ada2012.org/

I've used Ada on satellite programs, it's still very popular for that sort of thing. Ada has managed to carve out a small niche for itself in aerospace and I don't think it'll be replaced by rust anytime soon.

Which is fine, nothing wrong with Ada.