[Mond_]

> IMHO Rust has severe problems and what is considered "modern" is mostly taste.

Really? As opposed to e.g. C or C++ (as the most important languages which Rust is competing with)? Sure, taste plays into everything, but I think a lot of people work with Rust since it's genuinely a better tool.

I hear you on free software being controlled by corporate interests, but that's imo a separate discussion from how good Rust is as a language.

[Antibabelic]

Ada and SPARK fulfilled the promise of a safe systems language decades ago without making most of the mistakes Rust does. Rust has its strong sides, sure, but it's far from the only shop in town. The GCC happens to include an Ada compiler as well.

[dvtkrlbs]

The problem is they forgot about making the language approachable so it lives in its bubble for safety criticial usage (which Rust kinda starting to eat its lunch from with the certified Rust fork)

[Xylakant]

If you’re referring to Ferrocene with the certified Rust fork, then I’d like to make the minor correction that we don’t consider Ferrocene a true fork, but rather a downstream distribution of the Rust projects compiler. There are very little changes to the compiler itself. Most relevant changes are documentation, build process and different test coverage - we do test architectures that upstream does not.

[dvtkrlbs]

Yeah fork is a bad word for it. Sorry about that.

[Antibabelic]

What do you find unapproachable about Ada?

[dvtkrlbs]

For starter it looks completely alien my real introduction to Ada was with this article comparing it to Rust on solving advent of code [1] but it gives me that feeling when I try to read Haskell code (not that extreme). I did not actually give it a real chance though but its user base even more niche than Rust so idk. It has really cool properties (being able to define n bit datatypes is nice) but it is also leans to more on the imperative side so that also does not interest me.

[1] https://github.com/johnperry-math/AoC2023/blob/master/More_D...

[Antibabelic]

I wouldn't call it alien. If you've ever written even a little bit of Pascal, you should feel right at home in Ada.

[dvtkrlbs]

I never wrote a line of Pascal :/

[solidsnack9000]

What are those mistakes?

It seems like Ada more or less has to have memory safety bolted on -- that is what SPARK does -- and it's not clear that Ada's bias towards OO is better than Rust's bias towards functional programming.

Are you talking about features like type inference (so the Rust code could be less clear, since types are not always written out)?

[pjmlp]

And just recently Modula-2.

[einpoklum]

That is a 'subtle whataboutism' reply, actually...

you see, GP did not speak in relative terms, but absolutely: They believe Rust has problems. They did not suggest that problems with programming languages are basically all fungible, that we should sum up all problems, compare different languages, and see which ones come out on top.

[noosphr]

I'm very happy with common lisp for fast code.

Of course most people aren't smart enough for the language so they have to use inferior algol languages like rust.

[AlotOfReading]

No need to sully CL with this kind of elitism. Any language you need to be a genius to use is a bad language. That's one of the fundamental issues with C. We're all imperfect idiots some of the time and one instance of undefined behavior breaks any guarantees the language gives you.

[noosphr]

I find that languages with a high intellectual barrier to entry are much more pleasant places to be since people like the OP can't understand them and we never have people try to bully us into doing things _the right way_.

This is someone who says things like

>It's important for the project as whole to be able to move forward and rely on modern tools and technologies and not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software on retro computing devices.

While on company time.

[tclancy]

> since people like the OP can't understand them and we never have people try to bully us

Yes well, glad to hear there’s no one bullying people there!

[lsaferite]

I don't normally upvote snark, but... Bravo.

Elitism is it's own form of bullying and needs to be treated as such.

I don't particularly like large swaths of humanity, but I also try hard not to be elitist towards them either. I'm not always successful, but I make a strong effort as my family raised me to be respectful to everyone, even if you don't personally like them.

[noosphr]

I'm glad you understand how self defense works.