[short_sells_poo]

You seem to be arguing as if this effort should have gone to Ada instead. So go ahead and do it. There's a group of people who are trying to get kernel support for Rust. This is not a statement about Rust being superior to Ada or Ada's (in)suitability for the same job. It's only a statement that this group of people likes rust for it's safety features. I'm sure they are all aware that there are other, even safer languages, but these people like Rust.

We can lead academic discussions about which language is safer/better/leaner/whatever-er, but the fact is that Rust has a larger and growing mindshare so this effort is unsurprising. For Ada, the solution isn't to try and prove to anonymous forum goers it would've been better choice if only people recognized the fact. The solution is to mobilize the Ada community to put the same amount of effort into the publicity and marketing (yes, the bad M word) of their ecosystem.

Ada clearly lives on in many safety critical systems, but judging by the admittedly biased topic frequency on HN and other technical sites, it has a tiny community who mostly keep to themselves. That's fine, but then don't be surprised when it's Hip Language X that gets the headlines and these sort of efforts.

[pjmlp]

That effort has been happening for production code in high integrity systems since Ada was released to the world in 1983.

My only point is how many in the Rust community advocate as if Rust would be the first language having features, that actually were already in Ada for the past decades.

As for Ada on Linux, naturally Linus would never go along it.

A C kernel guy liking a language with Pascal syntax, a community that worships a paper that hasn't been true in the Pascal world since early 80's, not even at gunpoint.

If you want to see a use case where Ada was chosen against Rust, check NVidia's project for self driving vehicles firmware.

[short_sells_poo]

I appreciate what you are saying, but it is again just repeating why Ada is better than Rust. I posit that's irrelevant to this discussion. Rust is a safety centered language that seems to have champions and a growing community around it. Can we not just be happy that finally a safety conscious language has a following? If you are convinced Ada is better, nobody is stopping you from being the champion and building the Ada ecosystem. Right now, Ada is for all intents and purposes invisible both in terms of libraries, mindshare and hype.

[pjmlp]

Ada is alive where it matters most, high integrity systems.

Plenty of safety conscious language have had followings since ALGOL, this is the point that many miss when praising Rust, while ignoring our computing history.

[grumblenum]

>the fact is that Rust has a larger and growing mindshare so this effort is unsurprising.

I think that is a false perception created by the dev-blogging community. Based on GitHub activity (https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2021/2) Rust usage is declining (absolute numbers show little growth). Based on developer surveys (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2020/) very few people use rust outside of hobby development.

I think the concern is that the core argument that "I think Linux should adopt rust for safety" is a bit dishonest, given that there are a large number of well-vetted alternatives. "I think Linux should adopt rust because I like rust for social reasons" would probably be more correct. That Google staff seem to think rust is good for the Linux kernel but not, say, Zircon, would be surprising if those same people actually believed that any legal rust program is safe and inherently trustworthy. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" wasn't that long ago.

[short_sells_poo]

I don't use rust so I have no money in this game, but based on the two links you provided, Rust ranks the highest among the "safety minded" languages. It ranks the same level as Ruby, Swift, Matlab or R in the Jetbrains ranking. That's incredible for such a new language.

I mean, neither Ada nor Zircon are even on the lists, so in terms of mindshare, they are clearly blown out of the water by Rust (from the evidence you provide). To discount Rust based on usage when the alternatives being suggested don't even make the rankings is also a bit dishonest.

In fact, the argument "I think Linux should adopt rust for safety" makes perfect sense. Here's finally a safety conscious language that seems to be embraced by a larger community, and even the big tech players. Instead we get people suggesting arcane alternatives that may be technically better, but have a snowball's chance in hell to become commonplace any time soon.

[grumblenum]

Zircon is a kernel.

[bronson]

That’s minor. It sounds like you agree with the rest of the post?

[dexterlemmer]

Rust was considered for Zircon. The only reason it wasn't chosen was that at the time Rust wasn't yet sufficiently mature for embedded. And it really wasn't.

In the meantime, Google makes extensive use of Rust in new components of both Fuchsia and Android and even rewrites some legacy components where it makes sense.