[V_Terranova_Jr]

> Everyone was way more confident about the future of Ada, and with better reasons.

Is Ada really good support for your argument? Ada's heyday was well prior to the ubiquity of the Internet, had no focus on ergonomics, etc. Its initial adoption target was far more niche than Rust aims to be. I agree with you that there is a certain window in which to achieve relevancy, and that probably has much to do with why newer Ada versions haven't really achieved critical mass. On the other hand, Rust is being used in places from desktop software utilities (e.g., ripgrep) to large internal SaaS codebases. The field of potential Rust developers is far richer than I think Ada ever had.

[ncmncm]

Ada had literally billions of dollars in contracts backing it, a detailed specification, multiple industrial-grade implementations, tooling companies betting livelihoods on it, and university engineering programs teaching it. How many of those does Rust have? Any? Ada fizzled.

I have not needed to know of any important programs coded in Rust in general use. Ripgrep does not qualify. Alacritty does not qualify. (Haskell has, anyway, Pandoc and Git-annex.) I guess fragments of Firefox are coded in it. I like that Firefox is less crashy than a decade ago, but I doubt Rust is responsible: I think sandboxing gets that credit.

It is possible that Rust could become important someday, but only if things are done to make it so, most particularly acting not to drive away, for readily fixable reasons, a large majority of people who try it out for the first time.