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Comment by gilnaa | Hacker News Reader

Not to sound too aggressive, I'm not sure why ada programmers keep being surprised at the hype.

Safety (of all kinds) is not the only selling point of Rust and Zig, and the fact that Ada also have safety measures doesn't mean that it's instantly an option for me.

For example, I keep seeing people hype about Zig/Rust, for all kinds of reasons; and the way that they present their arguments is very compelling. While I've heard of Ada before, AFAICT the only context in which it is brought up is to downplay hype over Rust/Zig; never as a standalone.

Sounds like a PR problem, mostly.

EDIT: Not to say that there aren't other problems, just saying that this point alone isn't some magic bullet.

I don't like Rust because it gives me memory safety, tons of languages do that. I love Rust because the tradeoffs it gives me worth the switch, and the overall tooling and ecosystem are very well made.

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> Sounds like a PR problem, mostly.

It's the case that the Zig creator did put a high priority on soft "PR" for the language, the first hire was a developer advocate/community manager. I think this is a great case of "lessons learned" from the history of programming languages.

> I don't like Rust because it gives me memory safety, tons of languages do that. I love Rust because the tradeoffs it gives me worth the switch, and the overall tooling and ecosystem are very well made.

Same applies to the tooling of Ada/SPARK, but as you have said, it is pretty much a PR issue.

I'm not saying it's justified, but I think the syntax is also a big impediment (just like for my daily driver, OCaml). Ada looks pretty verbose and annoying to write code in, at least if one wants to use it for side projects, small utilities, etc. rather than spaceship firmware; and that's probably how a lot of languages become popular, you need to tinker with them on small things.

OCaml has seen the alternative "Reason" syntax (JS-like) grow in popularity. Maybe a C-like (or better, rust-like) syntax for Ada would help the language's adoption. People already using Ada would complain that the current syntax is fine but they're not the target demographic :-)

My opinion: I really dislike Rust's syntax because to me it is similar to Perl's that I also do not like that much as I do not know what is happening just by looking at it (I still like to use Perl here and there, but these days I lean towards Tcl more), it seems hidden from me, even compared to something as C where I have to think about conversions and whatnot.

I can easily read and understand someone's Ada, C, or OCaml code and actually know what is going on, but I cannot read and understand even my own Perl code (after a week or two), or other people's Rust code. I would rather prefer reference implementations to be in C than in Rust, too. If I read the C version, I can easily port it to any language vs. if it were in Rust.

Thank you for the answer :-). I'm still surprised because to me, Rust looks a _lot_ like OCaml with curly braces. The surface lexical conventions are mixed with C++ (like `::` for namespacing) but code still looks more like OCaml than C, with `let` bindings, sum types, expressions, `match` being omnipresent. Even the type annotations look more ML-ish than the type-first C convention. I fail to see the relation to perl (there's barely any `$` in rust code! and most sigils are still the & related to references that also abound in C).

I compared it to Perl because of its heavy use of symbols in general. In Rust, you can have 6 symbols next to each other and that is valid code. See below.

OCaml does not look like Rust to me (OCaml seems more consistent, and Rust seems like a mixed bag of everything to me). It does not hide as much behind symbols for example as Rust does, I think, and learning it was really easy. I tried to read Rust, I really did, but everything is so hidden from me. I did not mean to say that any of the mentioned languages are anywhere close to C though. In any case, if I had to look at reference implementations, C would be the best (to me). It is really easy to know what is going on and why, and thus it is easy to implement it in any languages I know. Probably because it is not a language with many high-level abstractions or language constructs (syntactic sugars) that hide what is going on.

Example snippets as to why I dislike Rust:

  let mut parents_array = ArrayVec::<[&[u8; BLOCK_LEN]; MAX_SIMD_DEGREE_OR_2]>::new()

  let input_ptrs: &[*const u8; DEGREE] = &*(inputs.as_ptr() as *const [*const u8; DEGREE]);

And this is nothing, there are much worse ones, and I would have to give you files for that, but pretty much any famous Rust project is difficult to read for me. I really do not understand most Rust code, I wonder if the problem is with me.

> Ada looks pretty verbose and annoying to write code in,

I still dont understand this, you spend 80% of the time thinking about code, 19% reading, and 1% typing.

I don't have this experience. I like to prototype by writing code (or type signatures), and then refactor a lot from the initial solution. That's easier to do if the syntax is reasonably concise (the other half is to have good types which Ada definitely provides).

80% thinking when you're stuck and don't know who to ask. I've made the same mistake. Have you watched some streamers? They are prototyping by typing, I would say, 50% of the time.

I never used Ada, but read a book on it.

I don't even remember much, just that how much I loved just the look of the example programs, but that was during community college when I was new to programming. It wasn't part of a class, but the guy who implemented the curriculum just jammed the library with jewels and the entire library collection was just full of classics especially since the actual curriculum was just a basic associates in "business data processing."

From what I can tell, safety isn't a selling factor of Zig. From a "safety" perspective Zig seems like a step backwards compared to the latest generation of languages, and Rust in particular. Zig's ergonomics seem decent but its memory safety tact appears to basically be to include valgrind-like tools into debug builds with good PR.

Not a Zig expert, but safety is a factor for Zig, it just treats it as less of an absolute than Rust. I think the thing to keep in mind is that something can be a priority without being an absolute priority. I'd make a comparison to OpenBSD vs Linux. Both have security as a priority, OpenBSD just has a more absolute focus on it.

For example, a couple of features come together really nicely to make memory safety easier to test in Zig: * You need a reference to an Allocator to be able to allocate memory, so as a general rule, the caller can control which allocator is used. * Unit testing is integrated well into the language. * Therefore, you can create an allocator for each unit test, and fail the test at the end if any memory was leaked. * This process can also happen at the application level with the General Purpose Allocator, which can let you print an error when the program exits if anything was leaked.

The above doesn't solve every memory safety problem (and there are other features like native bounds-checked slices that solve other kinds of issues), but it provides an extra layer that can probably get us quite far into the "quite safe" camp.

This. AFAICT Memory leaks are not practical to test in rust (note this is not the same as detectable), but basically come for free in zig tests.

Except that level of security I could already do with Pascal dialects like Turbo Pascal or Modula-2, hence why I really don't see much value in Zig, other than being more appealing to younger generations.

Putting valgrind into the stdlib is really clever, and also, I like memory safety being the carrot to get you to write tests. I worry having a 'safe' system like rust sometimes causes very smart (TM) developers, especially less experienced ones, to be complacent and write less tests.

Writing fewer tests is somewhat justified when you can encode invariants in the type system. It depends on the level of reliability you require of course. But my Rust code without tests has been comparably reliable to my code in other lanaguages eith tests.

No tests? How do you refactor while ensuring your business logic invariants?

Except I can already do that in C++.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/new-static-analysis-r...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/finding-bugs-with-add...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/code-quality/using-sal-...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/how-t...

No need to switch languages with a lesser eco-system, just learning to turn on the compiler switches that are already there.

Back when Ada was as young as Rust and Zig, we only had magazines like BYTE and Dr Dobbs, and BBSs for driving hype.

There were no free beer compilers and no 8/16 bit home computer was capable of hosting an Ada compiler, Basic, Pascal and Modula-2 was the best they could manage.

Sorry to hear that

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