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Why does it matter, really? I mean sure, ada could've been an alternative language that everyone pushed for using but it kind of missed the boat due to historic

Why does it matter, really? I mean sure, ada could've been an alternative language that everyone pushed for using but it kind of missed the boat due to historical circumstances , the context around its early use, etc. It might even be that rust users are just more enthusiastic and have been able to push more... But so what? But why does it matter if the language that has seen some traction in terms of "rewriting software in safer languages" is rust? At that point it becomes even more religious to just reflexively oppose rust because "well why didn't x or y see the same push??"? Again, it really doesn't matter why!

johnisgood 1y ago
This sounds like a dismissal. It is worth getting rid of the misunderstandings of Ada. It is worth letting people know that safe alternatives to C do exist and have existed long before Rust. You said it yourself that the issue may have been historical circumstances, in which case it should be clarified. Ada has a lot of great things built-in to the language. I especially love its type system and constructs for concurrency. Imagine if it had the hype of Rust, as a better alternative to C (which it easily could be). It goes further than Rust when it comes to safety, there is a reason for why you can find it in critical software. > But why does it matter if the language that has seen some traction in terms of "rewriting software in safer languages" is rust? At that point it becomes even more religious to just reflexively oppose rust because "well why didn't x or y see the same push??"? Again, it really doesn't matter why! If it does not matter, then why not Ada / SPARK indeed? I am sure the whys matter to some extent.
- mardifoufs 1y ago
  Again it doesn't really matter imo. There's no reason for ada rewrites to not take place, but I don't seem to come across a lot of community projects aiming at rewriting, say, coreutils in Ada. That's maybe due to the lack of hype (something rust doesn't lack at all). But regardless, I think that most people know and have know that memory safe alternatives have existed for a while.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    It comes across as if many people think Rust is the "most memory safe alternative". I dunno. I did start writing coreutils in Ada but I gave up. :(
    - mardifoufs 1y ago
      I agree that it does seem like there's a misconception that there's "C or C++" (system languages) and "the rest" (memory safe but not system langs). Which is obviously false, and I think the novel thing about rust's hype is that it's always compared to C or C++ (instead of java or c#, for example). I think that's why it feels like it's the only language that is talked about when discussing "memory safety" (even if most mainstream languages are memory safe now). Go had a similar "system lang" hype to it until it was clear that it really wasn't. Ada is undoubtedly a systems language (as you said it's been used to build insanely complex systems and it did just fine), but from my POV the little marketing that it has doesn't emphasize that. I think though one of the reason ada doesn't get discussed a lot is that it doesn't have a big open source community. Ada could even be more popular in terms of actual LoC written, but most of that development is held behind very closed doors, so it's very hard to actually get a community going. Which then makes it hard to actually go through a full rewrite of things like coreutils.

johnisgood 1y ago

This sounds like a dismissal. It is worth getting rid of the misunderstandings of Ada. It is worth letting people know that safe alternatives to C do exist and have existed long before Rust. You said it yourself that the issue may have been historical circumstances, in which case it should be clarified. Ada has a lot of great things built-in to the language. I especially love its type system and constructs for concurrency. Imagine if it had the hype of Rust, as a better alternative to C (which it easily could be). It goes further than Rust when it comes to safety, there is a reason for why you can find it in critical software. > But why does it matter if the language that has seen some traction in terms of "rewriting software in safer languages" is rust? At that point it becomes even more religious to just reflexively oppose rust because "well why didn't x or y see the same push??"? Again, it really doesn't matter why! If it does not matter, then why not Ada / SPARK indeed? I am sure the whys matter to some extent.

mardifoufs 1y ago
Again it doesn't really matter imo. There's no reason for ada rewrites to not take place, but I don't seem to come across a lot of community projects aiming at rewriting, say, coreutils in Ada. That's maybe due to the lack of hype (something rust doesn't lack at all). But regardless, I think that most people know and have know that memory safe alternatives have existed for a while.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  It comes across as if many people think Rust is the "most memory safe alternative". I dunno. I did start writing coreutils in Ada but I gave up. :(
  - mardifoufs 1y ago
    I agree that it does seem like there's a misconception that there's "C or C++" (system languages) and "the rest" (memory safe but not system langs). Which is obviously false, and I think the novel thing about rust's hype is that it's always compared to C or C++ (instead of java or c#, for example). I think that's why it feels like it's the only language that is talked about when discussing "memory safety" (even if most mainstream languages are memory safe now). Go had a similar "system lang" hype to it until it was clear that it really wasn't. Ada is undoubtedly a systems language (as you said it's been used to build insanely complex systems and it did just fine), but from my POV the little marketing that it has doesn't emphasize that. I think though one of the reason ada doesn't get discussed a lot is that it doesn't have a big open source community. Ada could even be more popular in terms of actual LoC written, but most of that development is held behind very closed doors, so it's very hard to actually get a community going. Which then makes it hard to actually go through a full rewrite of things like coreutils.