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Because they are not as good of a fit. Rust strikes an extremely good balance between memory safety and productivity. Also almost nobody knows Ada, and even few
by awestroke 4y ago
Because they are not as good of a fit. Rust strikes an extremely good balance between memory safety and productivity. Also almost nobody knows Ada, and even fewer the flavor you mentioned
- taylodl 4y agoAre we concerned with memory safety and security or popularity?
- tardibear 4y agoMaintainability is the other issue.
- pcwalton 4y agoBoth SPARK and Rust provide memory safety, so it's perfectly reasonable to use popularity as a "tie breaker". Applications are written by people; the more people who can usefully contribute, the more work can be done.
- 0xfedbee 4y agoWhat’s your source saying more people write Rust than Ada? There are people outside HN.
- anp 4y agoThe TIOBE index’s[0] methodology is definitely flawed but it currently lists Rust at 19 and Ada at 22. No mention of SPARK. [0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
- michaelmrose 4y agoIf you use a flawed metric that measures nothing of note noting relative position is not illuminating.
- mustache_kimono 4y ago> What’s your source saying more people write Rust than Ada? I think this "popularity" reasoning is flawed. It completely misses the context of the tool. Just ask yourself -- are there many UNIX CLI tools written in Ada/SPARK? I'm sure there are some, but not aware of any I use regularly. Meanwhile, there is a Cambrian explosion of Rust CLI tools taking place. "Popularity" is really a surrogate for "popular, accessible, infrastructure for an OSS CLI tool for UNIX", a place where Ada AFAIK has not been a first choice. If we were building firmware for a missile guidance computer, maybe the reasoning would be different? But it's still not a sufficient reason, so I'll add another: People really like using Rust to make these types of tools. It's amazing to me that people are so willing to discount as non-technical, and therefore unworthy of discussion, lots of people really like using Rust.
- pcwalton 4y agoIn my other comment I wrote "open source ecosystem" in order to avoid all the speculation about how much SPARK is used in commercial avionics and whatnot.
- ratmice 4y agoSeems obvious to me that ease of installation seems also is a factor where popularity can have an impact. If one is more popular that increases the likely hood that users will already be familiar with installation methods (ignoring actual difficulty), reaching more people in the process.
- csb6 4y agoSPARK goes further though. More advanced properties besides memory safety can be proven. This seems tremendously useful for something like sudo.
- chmod600 4y agoApparently both. Computer languages are partially to communicate between people and computers, and partially to communicate among people.
- LASR 4y agoExactly. The point of a programming language is to translate human intention into machine instructions. Whatever optimizes for the accuracy of the instruction output is the best. Sometimes it means language features. But it can also mean its popularity so you can get many more human eyes on the same bits of code.
- dogma1138 4y ago“Popularity” is quite important for security too as more people can vet the software and maintain it.
- mid-kid 4y agoYou overestimate how many people know rust.
- Cardinal7167 4y agoThe 2022 SO survey puts it as one of the most popular languages, and spark or ada don’t even make the list
- dogma1138 4y agoSO surveys are more indicative of how many people are aware of it and think it’s cool than how many people actually use it in anger.
- guipsp 4y agoYou're making this comment in comparison with ada?
- baq 4y agoMaybe we also underestimate how many people know Ada… doubtful but not impossible
- ender341341 4y agoI imagine the number of Ada people is decently high but hidden. But more importantly, how many of them are contributing to open source is lower (or at least advertising that they know Ada & contributing)
- tialaramex 4y agoLots of people seem to be learning Rust judging by the last few years of Advent of Code. In a safe language like Rust, the level of capability you get doing even say the first couple of weeks of AoC is enough that your small contributions to a project are likely to actually work and be more or less serviceable, so that's a huge help.