[yjftsjthsd-h]

Could I trouble you to compare Ada and Rust, especially in terms of safety? I'd like to be able to write low-level code without dealing with the insanity of C, and my top picks are Ada (traditional answer to "safe language"), Rust (the up and coming answer to "safe language"), and Pascal (friendlier than C and way better at least for memory safety), but I'm reluctant to learn all of them to sufficient depth to be able to decide in retrospect which one was worth learning:)

[Bayart]

Memory "unsafety" isn't bad. It's just a feature. In fact it's a feature some people want and need. I'd still start with C. There are all the ressources in the world to learn and it's better to know how to manage boundaries and memory allocation by hand than the other way around.

[Zababa]

Most of the time memory unsafety isn't a feature people want or need.

[Bayart]

There's a significant niche for such features, we're dozens. That's the reason why people like stuff like Zig. Pointer arithmetic isn't just dangerous, it's cool too.

[Zababa]

I'm not saying that memory unsafety is useless or even undesirable, I think the "problem" is that it's the default in "current popular and actually used high-performance languages", which means that stuff that needs to be fast and secure (like web browsers) have a hard time.

Maybe my "most of the time" was too strong and I ignored big domains that I don't know. But for the part that I relatively know (web stuff mostly), safety and speed together matters a lot. The thing is, since unsafety tends to be viral (an unsafe part of your stack can compromise everything), people get very paranoid about "unsafe languages".

[Bayart]

I understand your point, but for the most part memory-safety features and speed of execution run contrary to one another.

Garbage collection and bounds checking is big sticking point for systems / high performance programming, and to an extent real-time programming.

As far as I can tell, Rust should be about the limit of what's possible if you want to have your cake and eat it too. But I'll doubt it'll ever replace C for speed-critical applications.

[CRConrad]

Of those three, Ada and Pascal are as I understand it pretty closely related syntax-wise (in the same "family"), so learning one of those will help a lot with the other.

I'd recommend starting with Pascal, because of the comprehensive and high quality standard libraries (or "frameworks" -- see related recent HN discussion...) in Free Pascal and Delphi, and because Free Pascal can target a lot of different OSes. OTOH, a downside might be that you learn (to rely on) too much of the FCL/VCL in stead of just syntax, so you get confused at the lack of those libraries in Ada; that could speak for taking it the other way around.

TL;DR: IMO, in a way that's perhaps closer to two new languages to learn than three.

[CRConrad]

LCL, not FCL: Lazarus Component Library.