When performance and correctness are paramount, I personally stick to Ada/SPARK. Proven to be perfect for the job, and to be honest, Rust is quite a difficult language and I am not sure it is worth learning it considering that Ada/SPARK ticks all boxes when it comes to both low-level and high-level programming for critical systems.
I have fond memories of using Ada in college. Unfortunately it didn’t have much of an open source footprint and the community was downright hostile toward newbies (more so than other communities that I had experienced). I’m sure Ada has the stronger story for real-time embedded systems today, but (as I have learned Rust in the interim) I look forward to the day when Rust breaks into the real-time embedded space. In particular, I’m excited about ferrocene and the broader Rust certification efforts. I would really like to write embedded Rust professionally, and I hope certification will boost the number of embedded Rust jobs (no the to Ada, I just don’t particularly want to re-learn it).
My favorite thing about learning Rust is how helpful the community is.
Do you work in Ada/SPARK professionally? Curious what industry if so.