[hsivonen]

How does Ada address the problems that Rust's borrow checker addresses? Use-after-free in particular.

As for not being alternatives, how do they mix in the same project? Does Ada have C-compatible FFI that lets both Ada and Rust see each other as C?

[Raphael_Amiard]

> How does Ada address the problems that Rust's borrow checker addresses? Use-after-free in particular.

It has a more limited way of writing safe programs (memory pools and sub-pools, no aliasing by default, etc). That said, for some programs you will have to go unsafe and then you're done; however, from my limited experience with Rust it's also true there (Doubly linked list ?) even though you can go further and check more things.

Some people are working on having something similar in Ada/SPARK FWIW :)

> As for not being alternatives, how do they mix in the same project? Does Ada have C-compatible FFI that lets both Ada and Rust see each other as C?

Ada does have a C-compatible FFI, and in theory you can interface Rust and Ada. I don't know if it has been done though !

[kqr]

The general mindset is "if you need high integrity, you probably also need to statically determine an upper bound on memory usage." The consequence is that the safest Ada variants do not allow dynamic memory management at all.

But the next step down is to do the memory management in an isolated module of your code, which is then supposed to be vetted thoroughly.

Vanilla Ada (i.e. not the safest variant) does provide RAII for dynamic management of resources in general.

[fghvbnvbnfe]

Ada addresses memory issues in a couple ways. In a general sense, the language is designed to prevent the need for explicit allocations and pointers as much as possible. The runtime uses a secondary stack to return dynamically-sized objects from functions. The low level parameter passing details are also compiler-controlled. The programmer specifies how an argument is used (input, output, or both) and the compiler deals with how to accomplish that. There are some other features (mostly related to types and bounds) that all combine to generally reduce the need for explicit memory management.

Once you do get to explicit memory management, Ada does a number of things. I'm going to a list here just for my own sanity.

First, all deallocations are essentially marked unsafe. You use Unchecked_Deallocation() to free memory.

More importantly, it provides memory pools, and subpools. Each pointer type can be associated with a pool (or subpool). Once the pool goes out of scope, all memory is freed. You can use this to avoid explicit deallocations yourself. Pools also control allocations and deallocations, and there exist Debug pools that can help ensure memory is accessed correctly.

Ada also requires that stack-based objects be declared as "aliased" before you may make a pointer to them, so it's always clear where there might be trouble.

Finally (I think), Ada has a concept of accessibility levels. Essentially a pointer cannot point to an object that is more deeply scoped than itself. This isn't the perfection of the Rust borrow checker, but it does quite a bit.

As for C FFI, Ada does that quite well. It's got a package in the standard library with C interface types, and aspects for marking things for C FFI.