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Ada itself doesn't provide you the same guarantees as Safe Rust. You can use SPARK to grant Ada more memory safety capabilities. However as a language (rather t

Ada itself doesn't provide you the same guarantees as Safe Rust. You can use SPARK to grant Ada more memory safety capabilities. However as a language (rather than comments which may or may not be ignored by your Ada compiler) SPARK is from 2014, so now we're close to Rust's age. I assume that the totality of SPARK's guarantees would get you to the same place as Rust but I don't know. A big thing which counts against Ada (and SPARK) in practice is that it's not popular. You'll trip over Rust programmers everywhere, two of my friends are getting paid to write Rust, for completely unrelated companies, unrelated reasons, Rust seems like a reasonable fit so those companies picked Rust. You don't see that with Ada and SPARK.

cardanome 2y ago
I think Ada not being very popular shows that the need for a memory safe non-garbage collected language is kind of overstated. If there was really that much of a need, people would have flocked to Ada despite its shortcomings. Most people solved the safety problem a long time ago by switching to garbage collected languages. As times go on and garbage collector designs get better while hardware gets beefier you can get away with using a garbage collected language in more and more cases. Case in point golang marketing itself as a system programming language and succeeding, not to even mention even the game dev accepting C# these days. To be clear, there is a niche and need for safe and non-garbadge collected languages and there will always be. I am just saying the niche is much smaller than people might think. I think it is mistake for Rust evangelists to market safety of the killer-feature of the language. Rust is not popular because of the safety but because it lowered the barriers of entry for a new generation of system programmers by providing excellent tooling, error messages and a type system that take at least the lower hanging fruits of the academic functional world. That is all cool stuff beyond the safety circle jerk.
- burjui 2y ago
  > I think Ada not being very popular shows that the need for a memory safe non-garbage collected language is kind of overstated. It only shows that Ada is very old and verbose.
bluGill 2y ago
Rust gets the hype/talk. However there are a lot of Ada programmers out there who just do their 8 hours and go home and live their life. I doubt rust is anywhere near as popular as Ada, but I don't know how to measure that.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  > I doubt rust is anywhere near as popular as Ada, but I don't know how to measure that. I would have the reverse guess, but like you I can't think of a reliable way to get reliable numbers. Here's why I get my guess though: There just aren't that many defence IT people proportionally and only some of them are writing Ada. I saw no sign of non-defence Ada in noticeable quantities. Sometimes people are just upfront, we're a defence contractor, all our clients are military, everybody who works here must get clearance. Sometimes they're a bit more shy, please come talk to our specialist recruiter, and fill out all these forms that are surprisingly interested in you as a person not an employee (because they're pre-screening you, you will get security cleared). Nobody was like "Ada has been so great for our CRUD web sites" or "Come join our team writing a trading platform in Ada" or anything like that. So I think it just can't work statistically.

cardanome 2y ago

I think Ada not being very popular shows that the need for a memory safe non-garbage collected language is kind of overstated. If there was really that much of a need, people would have flocked to Ada despite its shortcomings. Most people solved the safety problem a long time ago by switching to garbage collected languages. As times go on and garbage collector designs get better while hardware gets beefier you can get away with using a garbage collected language in more and more cases. Case in point golang marketing itself as a system programming language and succeeding, not to even mention even the game dev accepting C# these days. To be clear, there is a niche and need for safe and non-garbadge collected languages and there will always be. I am just saying the niche is much smaller than people might think. I think it is mistake for Rust evangelists to market safety of the killer-feature of the language. Rust is not popular because of the safety but because it lowered the barriers of entry for a new generation of system programmers by providing excellent tooling, error messages and a type system that take at least the lower hanging fruits of the academic functional world. That is all cool stuff beyond the safety circle jerk.

burjui 2y ago
> I think Ada not being very popular shows that the need for a memory safe non-garbage collected language is kind of overstated. It only shows that Ada is very old and verbose.

bluGill 2y ago

Rust gets the hype/talk. However there are a lot of Ada programmers out there who just do their 8 hours and go home and live their life. I doubt rust is anywhere near as popular as Ada, but I don't know how to measure that.

tialaramex 2y ago
> I doubt rust is anywhere near as popular as Ada, but I don't know how to measure that. I would have the reverse guess, but like you I can't think of a reliable way to get reliable numbers. Here's why I get my guess though: There just aren't that many defence IT people proportionally and only some of them are writing Ada. I saw no sign of non-defence Ada in noticeable quantities. Sometimes people are just upfront, we're a defence contractor, all our clients are military, everybody who works here must get clearance. Sometimes they're a bit more shy, please come talk to our specialist recruiter, and fill out all these forms that are surprisingly interested in you as a person not an employee (because they're pre-screening you, you will get security cleared). Nobody was like "Ada has been so great for our CRUD web sites" or "Come join our team writing a trading platform in Ada" or anything like that. So I think it just can't work statistically.