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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting pretty tired of hearing about "safe" rust. And I love Rust. The language's promoters are pushing a vision of a world that's just not true. And while memory bugs are an important class of issues, logic bugs are even larger.

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Sure! On the other hand, if the compiler’s keeping me from writing memory bugs, I have more time and mental bandwidth to spend on avoiding logic bugs.

The same’s true with languages other than Rust, too. It’s not the only popular memory safe language.

Agreed. I'm a big fan of that stance. Part of what irritates me about the Rust love train is this pre-exists Rust.

No argument there. Rust is the first language that checks all the boxes for me — memory safe, compiled to machine code, open source, widely used, ergonomic — but if you told me you’ve been doing all that in Haskell, righteous! Rust didn’t invent any of those.

haskell def doesn't click all the boxes. it uses garbage collector and lazy evaluation can be a foot gun.

check out ada. it was being developed back when your average rust developer's parents were still dating and more or less tackled the same problems.

https://ada-lang.io/

sadly ADA never got the kind of love rust does. people say its hard to write code in but I don't see how its worse than rust. Rust just came at a time where the requirements and stakes for writing high performant and correct software became high enough that prioritizing it into the language design became valued. ADA was a little too early for its time.

I think one of the reasons why someone might think it's hard to write code in Ada is its Pascal-style syntax and verbosity, which might give the false impression that it's an "outdated legacy language". I've written a few hobbyist projects in Ada (SPARK to be specific) during my spare time and now I greatly enjoy the language, but my very first impression of it wasn't enthusiastic (coming from a C background). I don't fully understand why Ada lacks popularity compared to Rust, outside of Rust having a more vibrant community.

Nim (https://nim-lang.org also mentioned elsethread) was largely inspired by trying to make a more concise Ada with Python-like lexical sensibilities/ergonomics and support for first class meta-programming. Compilers for Nim are sadly not as mature as things like say the gnat Ada compiler.

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