With any luck, children growing up today won't learn C at all, or at least ONLY for historical understanding. It is an absolute security nightmare. Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages?
But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Ada is a prime example as it "has" more "safety" and is really old. And yet nobody talked about Ada before rust came with "safety".
With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". (note that Ada has more "safety" then just memory access)
Yes, and in the past twenty-five years these languages have stolen away 90% of developer mindshare from C and C++. The only niches that have held against the onslaught are those that thought that language-enforced memory-safety imposed runtime costs that they couldn't afford, coupled with a complete and total obliviousness to the actual cost of memory-unsafe code--especially over public networks. By the time that the internet (née Internet) became ubiquitous, Ada's name was already mud due to its prolonged standardization process, and it certainly didn't help that there existed no freely-available production-quality implementation until the late 90s. Even if Rust weren't here, Ada just isn't positioned to capture mindshare from the modern crop of developers weaned on dynamic languages, because not only does Ada not provide memory-safe dynamic allocation without a GC (Rust does), but it also doesn't have accessible documentation (all the books that I can find cost money, unlike Rust's free book, and all the standard API documentation that I can find is in PDF format only, unlike Rust's generated HTML docs with built-in search), and it also doesn't provide a package manager (which also kills C and C++ for people who started programming with Ruby/Python/Node), and it doesn't have any of the modern niceties that people expect from languages in this decade (I can't find anything to indicate that Ada supports any kind of closures that don't have to be hacked together manually, and its support for first-class functions seems dubious).
So let me amend my earlier pithy statement: Rust has hype because it's a language with modern amenities that has memory safety with no garbage collector. Nobody's disputing that Ada is safe, but Ada's lack of hype today is not because its safety is deficient, nor is it because programmer's don't care about safety. :P
> With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety".
Citation needed. :)
Feel free to write yet another page of text about how rust is the most greatest thing that is great and i am wrong.
*Also, though I now contradict myself because they preceded Java, the inspirations for Rust's more formal/statically-checked memory model: C++'s RAII and STL.
Same with most frameworks I know, regardless of where in the stack.
That's why I believe Java is a bad educational language, and Donald Knuth uses MIX assembly in his books.
You don't need to suffer through yesterday's problems to understand today's.
Someone has to write (and maintain) the safe languages.
PyPy is written in Python, golang has a compiler made in go, etc. Many others do rely in part on LLVM, but in the "long future" there's no technical reason why a common component like LLVM has to be written in C/C++, who knows, people might switch to something else written in a memory-safe language.