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 o

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.