> I'm confused when people don't use it for bigger systems. I like that the compiler detects most of my errors before I run the program. That is more likely du

> I'm confused when people don't use it for bigger systems. I like that the compiler detects most of my errors before I run the program. That is more likely due to the type system than manual memory management. People after all say the same thing about Haskell, which also has powerful types, but is garbage collected. There are two kinds of code errors to worry about: wrong answers (2+2=5), and divergence (a fancy name for crashing, i.e. 2+2=segmentation fault). In a jet engine controller, wrong answers and segfaults both potentially cause fatalities, so you better not use GC. Ada is made for that. In (say) a compiler, bugs leading to wrong answers (incorrect code emitted) might cause potential fatalities, but if the compiler segfaults from running out of memory, that's only annoying (the developer must find a workaround, use a bigger computer, or whatever). So it is fine to write a compiler in a GC'd language even if its memory footprint and timing characteristics are hard to verify. If you wrote a compiler in Ada you'd spend a bunch of time with manual memory management, for little benefit. In fact the most serious formally verified compiler (compcert.inria.fr) is written in Coq, which you can think of as an ultra precise dialect of OCaml and which is GC'd (Coq in this case generates OCaml code that uses the OCaml runtime. It can also generate Haskell etc.).