Corporate support or not, Rust seems to be a better contender for the crown of the sane successor to C++.
D might have been an important evolutionary step, possibly showing what does not work well for the niche it was trying to fill.
D might have been an important evolutionary step, possibly showing what does not work well for the niche it was trying to fill.
[1] I realize that this is not a universally held opinion, but it certainly seems to be pretty widely held.
I'm no expert in either Ada or Rust, but I _suspect_ that type system is more expressive in Rust, allowing for more precise static constraints.
Ada, of course, has decades of prod experience, though.
If you combine Ada with Spark you get some (still) amazing compile type proof checking of projects. [1]
Rust _could_ develop to have similar abilities (I hope!). But it’d need more generalized linear types or dependent types. Though one could write macros with stargeted higher level type checking DSL for, say, embedded development targets.
0: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/671 1: https://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/en/source/ty...
Plus, Rust has a thriving community whereas thanks to Adacore, Ada has a dying one. Community is critical for programming languages.
But otherwise, Ada is a brilliant and ultra safe language whose safety features go far beyond the memory and type safety that Rust features.
It's a shame.
It is the only Ada compiler available for free, fully updated to Ada 2012, with all the remaining ones are still on their 90's style prices.
https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/objectada
https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html
https://www.ddci.com/products_score/ (frozen in Ada 95)
Thanks to them Ada has become a regular presence at FOSDEM and is being teached at quite a few European university.
Also Ada allows for compiler assisted runtime allocation. For example, you can declare a datastructure with the size you want, and if it fits the stack it will be allocated, otherwise you get an exception.
Deallocation C style requires the Uncheked_Deallocation package.
Ada 95 removed GC from the standard, as no compiler ever bothered to implement it.
Here is an overview presented at FOSDEM 2016.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/ada_memory/
With SPARK and Ada 2012, Ada allows for better security constraints than Rust.
"Real-Time Critical Systems: HRM Prototype & Ada Integration"
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Critical-Systems-Prototype-...
They even have branding best practices and so on.
Of course, Google, being an advertisement company, has a lot of know how in that area.
Too bad Go is being held back by Rob Pike's ego, in my opinion.
Including compilation to WebAssembly as target.
Kotlin has reasonable compile times, GC of course, and also a reasonable concurrency story.
Go apparently has other special features, like making a single binary, and having very low-delay GC. Also, it's very simple; it's basically a pared-down Modula-2 with the Oberon's methods thrown in. It also got non-fitting magic features added, like returning two values (not a tuple), or built-in generic functions (like `make(chan)`) without generics anywhere else, etc. These do not fit well, which makes many people sad.
Support from a big corp is one way to get things like IDE support ironed out, as they can throw extra resources at it.
The RLS is used in VSCode, I think Atom, I’ve seen a port for Emacs, and I think Sublime.
The community effort is behind the RLS, the Jetbrains plugin for IntelliJ doesn’t use any of the Rust compiler, as far as I’m aware, but it does have a lot of fans, so they’re doing something right.
As a Java fan of IntelliJ, I still prefer the RLS+VSCode, but it’s great seeing all the IDEs being developed for Rust!