https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

I love using Rust for new development but curl is _everywhere_ and a port would need to spend a lot of time copying old quirks. Given how clunky C APIs are, I’d think it’d be better to migrate more of the callers to a higher-level interface anyway.

OTOH, a rewrite could be useful in splitting up the problem-space as well as reducing errors. This is where Ada excels, and one nice way of splitting the problem-space could be in providing types (perhaps with provable properties via SPARK) that properly decompose the problem-space.

    -- Small, quick/dirty "back-of-napkin" design.
    Package Uniform_Resource_Locator is
      Type Protocol is (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, ETC );
      Type URL is private;
      
      Function Get_Protocol(Object : URL) return Protocol;
      -- other operations.
      Function Parse(Text : String) return URL; -- Text to URL.
      Function "+"(Object : URL) return String; -- URL to Text.
    Private
      Type URL is record
        --...
      end record;
    End Uniform_Resource_Locator;

Given the properties of a language like Ada, you could decompose the problem-space into types (like above) and leverage the language properties to ensure the correctness of the program. For example, Ada mandates full-coverage on cases can so when you say `case Get_Protocol(The_URL) is ...` you have to provide for every value in the enumeration (Protocol here), and the compiler enforces this. So, every place you have a case-statement operating on a Protocol value, absent the `others` option, the compiler will error-out and point you to the location you're missing a value.

...meaning that you can update the Protocol enumeration and have the compiler complain at every location you need to fix/implement the new protocol.

Defaults matter.

P.D: Think if web browser were not fixed or improved because maybe somebody is using Win95. Its the same. The path to better is stop using what is proven to be bad (C/C++ is proven to be very bad!). The path to make sure niche platforms are covered is turn what is better in something more popular until it replace the old... and niche platforms use it...

This is called progress. Is how its done.

There was a blog post a while back where he more or less said "I am being paid to add Rust".