MISSION CRITICAL SOFTWARE

Besides sounding like a sales term taken directly from scripture of The Laughing Monkey Clan^[1],
I am asking you guys: what language (do you|should I) use to develop mission-critical software? (Stuff like autopilots or reactor control systems.)

JPL has their own coding standard which "primarily target[s] the development of mission critical flight software written in the C programming language"^[2], which makes for an interesting read.

I was thinking about Haskal, but since it's garbage collected and pausing for more than 150 ms would mean certain death for my project? It seems like a bad choice.

_{[1] http://thecodelesscode.com/names/Laughing+Monkey+Clan
[2] http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf}

>>2-4
If the code is for a ``mission critical'' real-time system pretty much anything that uses exceptions or GC is out. If you further restrict yourself to languages that more people actually know, that means C or a subset of C++.

>>2
I believe sel4 was prototyped in Haskell for model checking purposes, but the final implementation is in C.