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0 pointsjvanderbot4y ago0 comments

My CS advisor in undergrad stirred a love of safety in me with Ada. I've always wanted to get back into it. Recent headlines have made me think that Rust will move in that domain. In 10 years, probably a lot of safety-critical systems will use a lot of Rust. Ada was (to my knowledge) never particularly well accepted by "the masses", whereas Rust is. It was just too early.

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samhw4y ago

Oh, nice! No, Ada doesn't seem ever to have achieved the same mainstream adoption, or at least awareness, that Rust has. Which is startling to me, because it's comparable to Rust in performance while being far far greater in safety, including inbuilt support for design-by-contract (honestly I feel like I'm shouting at a brick wall trying to get people to understand the benefits of DbC; Rust's type system is only a first-order approximation).

I agree that the problem seems to be that most 'practical programmers' don't understand the benefits of PL-research-y features, until they're forced to use it and then suddenly it takes off (cf the growth of ADTs or dependent typing after TypeScript introduced people to them).

The other problem is the perennial 'trendyism' in programming, which I hate. People won't investigate interesting languages from the 80s with unusual features; only once something's added to the JS framework du jour does it achieve wide adoption.

erik_seaberg4y ago

Back when I learned Ada it didn’t have a solution for use-after-free, does DbC fix that by expressing ownership and sharing?

samhw4y ago

There was a thread a while back which covered the various variants of Ada and how their memory management contrasts with that of Rust: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210258

Basically: no, it likely hasn't changed much since you learned it, unless that was genuinely decades ago. But there are various solutions (or, at least, ideas which are considered solutions, depending on what you consider the problem to be) that you might have missed!

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samhw4y ago

erik_seaberg4y ago

Back when I learned Ada it didn’t have a solution for use-after-free, does DbC fix that by expressing ownership and sharing?

samhw4y ago

There was a thread a while back which covered the various variants of Ada and how their memory management contrasts with that of Rust: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210258

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse