AdaCore Reports Growth in Memory-Safe Language Design Wins Across US Aerospace and Defense Programs

AdaCore, the provider of software development and verification tools for safety- and security-critical systems, today reported a significant increase in design wins across US Aerospace and Defense (A&D) programs that rely on memory-safe programming languages. The growth spans AdaCore's Ada and SPARK toolchain, long a gold standard for certified avionics and defense software, and Rust, an emerging systems language increasingly favored by the Department of Defense and its prime contractors.

These wins span a range of mission-critical domains, including avionics flight control, autonomous unmanned systems (UAS and UAV), ground-based command-and-control infrastructure, secure communications platforms, and next-generation satellite systems. The accelerating adoption reflects a broader shift away from memory-unsafe languages such as C and C++, driven by regulatory pressure, national security imperatives, and the hard lessons of high-profile software vulnerabilities in defense platforms.

The trend is reinforced by new independent research. A VDC Strategy report, Memory-Safe Languages Offer Protection for Devices and TCO, surveyed more than 500 embedded software decision makers and found that engineers ranked Ada, SPARK, and Rust as the three best languages for meeting safety and security requirements out of 26 languages evaluated. More than 85 percent of respondents said that programming language choice can directly affect product safety and security.

Why Memory Safety Is a National Security Imperative

Memory safety vulnerabilities, including buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, and null pointer dereferences, account for approximately 70 percent of critical software security vulnerabilities, according to research published by Microsoft and Google and echoed in guidance from the NSA. In commercial software, such flaws can often be mitigated through rapid patching. In Aerospace and Defense, that option frequently does not exist.

Software defects in flight control systems, weapons platforms, or battlefield communications infrastructure can result in mission failure, loss of life, or exploitable vulnerabilities that adversaries can weaponize. Unlike enterprise IT environments, embedded A&D systems often operate for years or decades without software updates, making it essential that correctness and security are designed in from the start rather than patched in after deployment.

Memory-safe languages address these risks at the source. SPARK's formal verification capabilities allow engineers to mathematically prove the absence of entire classes of runtime errors before code runs on target hardware. Rust achieves memory safety through an ownership and borrowing model enforced at compile time, eliminating common vulnerability patterns without sacrificing performance. Both approaches align with the deterministic, zero-defect engineering standards required by programs operating under DO-178C, MIL-STD, and related certification frameworks.

New Research Quantifies the Business Case

Beyond security, the VDC Strategy research puts numbers to the operational advantages that matter most in Aerospace and Defense, where certification effort and multi-decade deployment lifecycles amplify the impact of every engineering decision. Among the findings:

Ada projects were four times more likely to finish ahead of schedule than C projects, and SPARK showed the strongest schedule performance in the survey. Projects using memory-safe languages reported median development costs two to four times lower than those using C and C++. Over a typical seven-year deployment, memory-safe languages were associated with patch and defect remediation savings of up to 60 percent. These schedule and lifecycle advantages are especially significant for A&D programs, where late-stage verification and long-term sustainment are among the largest cost drivers.

The research also speaks to the growing role of AI-generated code in defense software. Users of memory-safe languages reported higher trust in AI-generated code than those using C or C++, with SPARK's formal verification cited as a means of raising confidence in code produced by agentic AI workflows. In these workflows, verification remains the authority, and safety stays with the engineer.

“Our customers in aerospace and defense cannot patch their way out of a software defect once a system is fielded, so correctness has to be built in from the start,” said Quentin Ochem, President and CEO of AdaCore. “Memory safety is increasingly seen as a baseline requirement, not a nice-to-have. The independent research released alongside these design wins confirms that this is not only the safer path, it is also the faster and more cost-effective one.”

Regulatory and Policy Tailwinds

The push for memory-safe languages is now embedded in US government policy. The National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) have each issued guidance urging the defense industrial base to transition away from memory-unsafe languages. CISA's Secure by Design initiative and the ONCD's Back to the Building Blocks report have both identified memory safety as a foundational requirement for software used in critical infrastructure and national security systems.

This policy environment has created strong pull from program offices and defense primes seeking tools and languages that satisfy both technical certification requirements and the evolving expectations of government customers.

Report Availability

The full VDC Strategy report, Memory-Safe Languages Offer Protection for Devices and TCO, is available to download at https://www.adacore.com/papers/memory-safe-languages-offer-protection-for-devices-and-tco