[ceteia]

People made similar arguments regarding C++ versus Ada. The US military and defense industry even got something like a mandate in the 1990s to only write in Ada.

And then there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost. The code was written in Ada.

And using seat belts and wearing helmets do not help in those cases where 'unsafe' is used to take the seat belts and helmets off. And that is needed in Rust in a number of types of cases, such as some types of performance-sensitive code.

[pjmlp]

Yes, people like to point out Ariane explosion, without going into the details, and missing out on F-35 budget explosion much worse, with ridiculous failures like having to reboot its avionics in flight.

It is like bringing the news of that lucky soul, that only survived a car crash, because it was thrown out of the car, managed to land in such a way that it survived the crash, survival statistics be dammed.

[ceteia]

Wasn't the F-35 budget "explosion", or overruns, caused in general by mismanagement? But I will not argue that C++ is perfect. Instead, the ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost, with code written in Ada, is an example where Ada was presented as a safer language and even mandated in the military industry, but where it turned out less well in practice. Even proclaimed "safer" languages can have catastrophic failures, and one can suspect that they might even be less safe in practice, especially if they need mandates to be picked. Instead of Ada companies or other organizations lobbying to force industry to use their language, maybe it is better if there is free competition, and then the onus is on the software development companies to deliver high quality. Ada has improved since the 1990s, perhaps because it has been forced to compete fairly with C, C++ and other languages. Following that thinking, increased, not decreased, competition should be encouraged.

Your lucky soul analogy argument doesn't make any sense.