Alternatively, just get better at C/C++… It isn’t going anywhere, and it feels like more developers are coming around to the idea that maybe security guarantees are not worth throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
11–20 of 173 posts
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#12Personally I think Swift can be a good choice that is more familiar to existing C++ developers than the others, and a lot of people seem to be sleeping on it.
It has full native interop with C and C++ so you can already use all your existing libraries. Historically it lacked cross-platform support but this is not true anymore. It does lack a native GUI framework, but for now you can keep using C++ ones.
Some people complain about its ties to Apple, but hopefully with it gaining much wider cross-platform support, it may not matter that much in the future, but I guess it remains to be seen.
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#13Their example of why Ada has better strong typing than Rust is that you can have floats for miles and floats for kilometers and not get them mixed up. News flash, Rust has newtype structs, and you can also do basically the same thing in C++.
I don't know much about Ada. Is its type system any better than Rust's?
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#14Alternatively, just get better at C/C++… It isn’t going anywhere, and it feels like more developers are coming around to the idea that maybe security guarantees are not worth throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It’s a common misconception that the point of Rust is just security. Rust helps avoid a very broad class of bugs, that security bugs are only a subset of.
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#15yes, you should.
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#16I've never heard of SPARK. What advantages does it have compared to Lean?
It's basically a subset of Ada, so you can use it anywhere you'd use Ada. I don't think Lean is at a point that it's an Ada replacement.
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#17Dlang is the GOAT!
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#18SPARK is used by NVIDIA for the most secure compute code.
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#19Dlang is the GOAT!
Haha, Walter you're definitely not biased on this one. :)
Re: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
#20I know there is a belief that Rust/Ada etc is safer than C/C++ and in some cases that is true. I know of multiple, airworthy aircraft that are flying with C++ code. I also know of aircraft flying with Ada. The aircraft flying with Ada is hard to maintain. There is also a mountain of testing that goes into it that is not just unit testing. This mountain of integration, subsystem and system level testing is required re…
I've never worked in aerospace, however I'm interested in safety-critical software engineering, and I've written a lot of Ada (and written about my experiences with it too).
My understanding is that yes you can write safety-critical code in just about any language, but it's much easier to prove conformance to safety standards (like DO-178C, etc.) in Ada than in C++.
I regularly do hobby bare-metal programming in both Ada and C. I find that Ada helps prevent a lot of the common footguns in C. It's not a silver bullet for software safety, but it definitely helps. The point of any programming language is to make doing the right thing easy, and doing the wrong thing hard. All things considered, I think Ada does a good job of that.