That doesn't make any sense - Pascal and Ada and whatnot that were around in the 1980s, which means the fundamental problem can't be performance on any modern embedded chip. Besides which, you don't trade away stability for performance on a safety-critical chip!
It's not a technical challenge, but a political/business one. C/C++ won out.
> you don't trade away stability for performance on a safety-critical chip!
In a sane world, no. But we don't live in a sane world. We live in one where (on one system I worked on) it turned out a plane having an overheat (not fire) on one engine would cause the overheat on the other to fail to report to the pilots (corrected or I'd name and shame). And that wasn't just an issue of language, but of sound (or unsound in this case) logic. No one sits down and develops these things correctly. 10k lines of code (at most) on that project and most of it was just cobbled together in an ad hoc fashion.
