[pjmlp]

Only true for those stuck in Ada83.

People keep repeating this nonsense without updating themselves beforehand.

EDIT: To simply education on Ada,

Yes there was an optional GC, no one ever implemented it, so in Ada2012 got removed from the standard.

Almost everything can be allocated on the stack, so a strategy is to catch exceptions of not enough stack space and retry the same function with a smaller size for the data structure.

Ada95 introduced controlled types, which is basically Ada's version of RAII, no need to call Unchecked_Deallocation outside implementation details. Hardly any different from Rust code that uses unsafe underneath.

Ada/SPARK, now part of regular Ada specification, provides theorem proving capabilities, and contracts, allowing another safety level still not available in Rust.

Additionally Ada Core is contributing improving lifetime rules for access types, to have a kind of borrow checker light, when needed.

Finally, there are still 7 Ada vendors in business, with 40 years of experience deploying Ada into safety critical scenarios.

[norman_roman]

>Ada95 introduced controlled types, which is basically Ada's version of RAII, no need to call Unchecked_Deallocation outside implementation details. Hardly any different from Rust code that uses unsafe underneath.

This is basically like C++ destructors, but the problem is there are no move semantics in Ada, so you can't implement something like unique_ptr.

It's hardly comparable with Rust.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, that is what happens when one doesn't understand contracts and formal proofs are used, my dear newly created account to advocate for Rust.

[peppermint_gum]

I've noticed a pattern that many Ada advocates on HN don't really seem to know the language. So they often conflate SPARK with Ada (as you just did) and make unfounded claims about Ada's memory safety, portraying it as being on par with Rust.

It isn't on par, Ada has no lifetime management whatsoever. It doesn't even provide C++ style smart pointers out of the box. It is possible to implement something like shared_ptr, AdaCore even has a tutorial[1], but as the other commenter pointed out, the language doesn't provide the primitives necessary for unique_ptr.

SPARK does have something like this. In fact, in SPARK, every pointer assignment transfers the ownership. But SPARK and Ada aren't synonymous. SPARK is a formal verifier built on top of Ada. Like most such tools, it's very constraining and time-consuming. It's not something that every (or even most) Ada projects use.

Nevertheless, Ada is a perfectly good language, and it's probably safer than C++. It has some really cool features. I'm really fond of in/inout/out references (cppfront stole this), named function parameters, secondary stack, fine-grained control over records (struct) layout, etc.

However, I'm not so fond of the extreme verbosity. It isn't just because of Algol-like keywords, Pascal is less verbose than Ada. Even basic stuff like instantiating generics is very noisy:

   procedure do_something is
     package Integer_Vectors is new
       Ada.Containers.Vectors
         (Index_Type   => Natural,
          Element_Type => Integer);

       vec : Integer_Vectors.Vector;
     begin
       return;
     end;

In C++ that would be:

    void
    do_something(int arg) {
        std::vector<int> vec;
    }

[1] - https://www.adacore.com/gems/gem-97-reference-counting-in-ad...

[pjmlp]

SPARK is part of Ada, time to update your ISO Ada knowledge.

[peppermint_gum]

No, it isn't. I think you're confusing contracts (added in Ada 2012) with the entirety of SPARK.

[tomcam]

What’s your sense of the size of the Ada job market? High hundreds? Close to 10,000? Is it static or growing or shrinking? Is there a preferred online community for Ada devs?

[BirAdam]

The Ada job market is still large in aerospace and defense industries where lives are on the line.

[tomcam]

When you say large, what do you guess in actual numbers? Just a rough impression; I'm not going to hold you to anything.

[touisteur]

Probably a thousand max in France? extrapolating from the ones I know, if you're talking defense/aeronautics (but I don't know or see everyone). Someone from AdaCore would give a better approximate.

We (embedded company) don't hire specifically with Ada experience (it's welcome but not mandatory) we just train people and then focus on shipping stuff.