D - Unsafe and doomed

[Paulo Pinto]

On 04.01.2014 13:09, QAston wrote:
> On Saturday, 4 January 2014 at 11:36:20 UTC, bearophile wrote:
>> NoUseForAName:
>>
>>> http://rust-class.org/pages/using-rust-for-an-undergraduate-os-course.html
>>>
>>
>> Why aren't they using Ada? It has a really refined and safe
>> parallelism, it's quite safe, it teaches a student the correct ways of
>> dealing with pointers, memory etc in a low-level setting. It's usable
>> for hard-realtime. And it's way more commonly used than Rust. There
>> are books on Ada. Its compilers are solid, and while Ada is being
>> updated significantly (the latest is Ada2012) there's no risk in
>> having important parts of the language become backward incompatible in
>> the short term. Ada code is not sexy, but this is not a significant
>> problem for an advanced course lasting few months. Ada is a complex
>> language, but it's the right kind of complexity, it's not special
>> cases piled on special cases, it's features piled on features to deal
>> correctly with different needs (just like in D, despite D is less
>> designed for correctness compared to Ada).
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> Ada is not hype enough, so it doesn't qualify. J/K (no death-threats
> please), I gave rust a try, i couldn't get it to run on my OS.


I agree with you here.

Ada seems to be growing in Europe, at least from what I can tell every 
time I attend FOSDEM.

I would say we have to thank C's lack of safety and the availability of 
GNAT for it.

But the language uses Algol based syntax and is verbose for C 
developers, which makes it not hype enough as you say.

--
Paulo