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by nickpsecurity 3345 days ago
Ada was one of first, safer languages for system programming that also aimed to help with programming in the large, concurrency, maintainability, etc. Rust is the latest in that niche although without the embedded focus of Ada's common usage. So, of course we can compare them. Here's another on SPARK Ada vs Rust that's surprisingly fair from an AdaCore rep:

http://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial/rust-and-spark-so...
1 comments
fghvbnvbnfe 3345 days ago
Of course you can compare them. I didn't mean we shouldn't ever look at the differences in how languages do things. We should. I meant I didn't understand how one could be seen as a replacement or straight alternative of the other. They have different goals.

And I've seen that before. Frankly I thought it overly nice to Rust by not spending any time at all considering the differences in user-defined types. That's really one of the biggest and most important differences to me, and a place I think Rust really falls short.

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nickpsecurity 3345 days ago
"I meant I didn't understand how one could be seen as a replacement or straight alternative of the other. They have different goals."

I agree. It's just a weird thing about these discussions that makes it necessary to bring up. The online forums typically divide between "system" languages you can write OS's or low-level code in versus "application" languages you write anything else in. Performance comes into play. GC vs non-GC, too. The kinds of benefits on safety and system side that people like about Rust are the categories Ada is designed to handle. It's behind on temporal safety but otherwise solid. So, we have to bring up the comparison due to how the local community might be mentally categorizing or evaluating things.

Also, many wanted something safer or better than C/C++ but never heard of Ada. That's worth addressing in and of itself. I think D language has a similar problem where it's a lot better than C++ in many ways but gets too little attention. Once upon a time, there were Delphi and Modula-3, too. Those times are past us. :(

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