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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

> It’s truly the only low-level language that could actually be used for systems programming.

No it is not. There is Ada/SPARK and has been for a long time, and it is for critical systems. I recommend checking out https://blog.adacore.com/ for examples, there is plenty of that. For one: "An Embedded USB Device stack in Ada". There are also many articles about SPARK. For example: "Enhancing the Security of a TCP Stack with SPARK". These are just one of the recent articles.

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The person you're responding to is wrong (there have been lots of languages before and after Rust that have been used for systems programming), but there are also lots of legitimate reasons why Ada was never considered a serious contender: GCC's mainline support (via GNAT) still didn't fully stabilize until the late 2000s, and GNAT (AFAIK) remains the only unencumbered implementation that's broadly available. Rust has the same single-implementation issue, but is actively working on different codegen backends to resolve it.

For better or worse, the ship has probably sailed on Ada/SPARK making its way into mainline Linux.

does Ada have a big enough user base for there to be people around to do kernel work?

People seem to love Rust. I've never seen that kind of enthusiasm for Ada.

I know. That is one of the major issues: lack of hype. Most Rust enthusiasts have not even heard of the language, or they did and they have misconceptions about it. If they truly care about safety, they should definitely check Ada/SPARK out.

What advantages does Ada have over Rust (in terms of memory safety)?

Ada/SPARK allows formal verification of many more properties than just memory safety. Ada on its own does not have the same kind of memory safety guarantees as rust though.

(I have no horse in this race, just curious.)

Are there any non-proprietary implementations of Ada/SPARK which don't place limitations on the compiler output?

Apparently [0][1] the FSF distribution of GNAT permits development of non-GPL software.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492653

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ada/comments/3989f4/gnat_gpl_restri...

I was asking the opposite question, I think. I know of GNAT, but I was asking whether there's any Ada/Spark that has a GPL (or whatever non-proprietary) license.

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