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by projektfu 925 days ago
Ada people scratching their heads....
3 comments

Neither Ada nor Rust are completely memory-safe... and they are partially unsafe in completely different ways. But I guess people prefer the Rust explicitness.
Ada is safe if you never free memory explicitly. The story for reclaiming memory without GC was always a little weird, basically pool allocation by type. But it does bounds checking, counted strings, and has a reasonably rich type system that allows variants and things in a safe way.
Ada has Controlled types, so the memory reclaiming story can be similar to C++/Rust RAII. What it's missing compared to Rust is the lifetime and borrow checking.
How many of them are left? I thought it was very much a dead language
Far from it.

"SQL/PSM (SQL/Persistent Stored Modules) is an ISO standard mainly defining an extension of SQL with a procedural language for use in stored procedures... SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language. However, Oracle has maintained a distance from the standard in its documentation. IBM's SQL PL (used in DB2) and Mimer SQL's PSM were the first two products officially implementing SQL/PSM. It is commonly thought that these two languages, and perhaps also MySQL/MariaDB's procedural language, are closest to the SQL/PSM standard. However, a PostgreSQL addon implements SQL/PSM (alongside its other procedural languages like the PL/SQL-derived plpgsql), although it is not part of the core product."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM

As I understand, there's a very long tail of continued Ada use in military and aviation.

So depends on your definition of "dead"

It's still very popular in air traffic control. Some older NASA and military projects used it and are still in use.
There are still plenty of Ada devs around, but they're almost all in the DoD or working for defense contractors.
It is odd since Ada is DoD's (bastard?) child and NSA is DoD but a little digging you get this from 1997 (with a singular mention of the word "safety"):

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/3

tldr; seems to be that the software development world has changed from the days that DoD was the "dominant" software developer, and Ada in the interim did not get adopted by the commercial sector (with safety critical exceptions in aerospace, etc. noted).