I always find that C++ vs C comparison to be amusing, given I work with a bunch of C folks who don't like C++ but love Rust... not everyone likes languages for the same reasons. There's a grain of truth in sayings like this, but it's not the whole picture.
(I am also not saying Rust is the only thing, or that Rust should "win" over Zig, whatever that means, or anything more broadly. My comment is purely about how Rust is too "new" and "untested", in a vacuum.)
Thanks for the comment about the blog post. It was a fun one to write.
The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Rust is a large collaborative project that has explicitly avoided having a BDFL, and maybe there are others involved with deeper expertise in the existing state of the art in memory safe languages. Maybe the problem Rust is trying to solve is fundamentally new, but I'm skeptical of that.
For all the projects out there that casually look as if they are reinventing the wheel, I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different or why the world has changed or why what came before got something crucial wrong.
I think there's a few ways to tease apart what you're saying here. First of all, I think that, even if we take this at face value:
> The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning.
Not having tons of practical experience with one language is not the same as "not an expert on the past/current state of the art." I am a student of programming language history, I just hadn't spent a ton of time with Ada specifically. There are a lot of programming languages out there, and unless that is your sole focus, you'll miss some.
That being said, Graydon is that kind of person, and as far as I can tell, knows everything about every language. While he hasn't been involved in Rust for a while, and Rust looked very different back when he started it, that knowledge was expressly there.
> I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different
I mean, we have. "memory safety without garbage collection" was our slogan for a very long time. While Ada does have many mitigations here, fundamentally, heap allocation is unchecked, and can cause double-frees or use after frees. SPARK does give you memory saftey, but does this by being an aggressive subset that, as far as I know, doesn't let you use dynamic allocation or pointers at all.
But, moreover, it is true that we do not often compare ourselves to other languages directly. This is more of a cultural issue than anything else. Programming languages are very tribal, and even well-meaning comparisons can come across as very aggressive. We don't discourage people making these kinds of comparisons themselves, but as a project, we prefer to talk about what Rust can do, rather than about what other languages can't do. These social reasons blend into technical reasons; programming language cultures that become obsessed with talking about why they're better than others often miss out on the good parts of those other languages. In the end, I think we get better cross-pollination with other languages by not explicitly comparing and contrasting with them in our public-facing marketing. Comparisons, in, say, an RFC are fantastic. These often do get made. But that's internal facing communication, not external.
My comment was in reaction to jolux's assertion that those exploring other solutions to safety are acting in an irresponsible, unprofessional, and unethical manner. I've been digging into Zig and Ada on the side for personal projects, and thus spending time on their respective reddits and forums. And dealing with the Rust zealots trolling these communities is verging on intolerable. Like you point out, "Why Reddit is like this" is a whole other issue, but there's a reason people are reflexively defensive. This issue comes up in the content of the podcast under discussion as well. So my bar in this case was the point where we should converge on some single solution, which I don't think is representative of Rust's official stance, but it is an issue with Rust's larger informal community. Or maybe it's just a problem with Reddit and HN.
The bar I suspect you are talking about is more along the lines of should people be using Rust in production, and clearly Rust has reached that point. People with far more at stake than I have are successfully using Rust in production, and that is a necessary step forward to things like a formal standard and multiple implementations.
Your point around the outward facing marketing is interesting. It's a shame and I don't think it speaks well of us as in industry that we tend to be so tribal around discussing the deficiency and comparisons of our tools, but I can see where the idea to focus on what your own project can do is more effective messaging. Its interesting how that kind of ties back to this post https://steveklabnik.com/writing/rust-is-more-than-safety in which you dig into some of the issues marketing Rust.
FWIW you now have me wondering the same question of why does Zig deserve to exist when Ada exists as well and start to see if I can put together a decent comparison to understand the spaces they all function in.
There are literally dozens of us!
Which is what a lot of c code does too. And zig might too?
Every time I asked the same question the answer was syntax.
I wonder if we should have gone the typescript way to make the language less readable, as joked about in this post: https://blog.adacore.com/a-modern-syntax-for-ada
2) More software. Particularly older software, watching Rust code bases evolve over time.
3) Most topical to this thread, watching how other approaches to safer programming shake out. Its hard to have confidence in a solution to a generic problem when you can only evaluate a single solution. For example I find Zig to be a potentially much better solution since it has a far smaller surface area.
Somebody on HN said: Rust is what you get when C++ programmers try and fix memory safety, Zig is what you get when a C programmer tries to do it, and based on the Rust and Zig code I've seen this really rings true.
Rust is on a great track, but it seems way way too early to declare victory and start claiming that everybody exploring the same safe programming space is functioning as an unethical professional.
EDIT: As an aside I enjoyed your blog post on learning Ada, stream of consciousness and all. You ask what the bar is, the bar is Ada. Decades in the market, formal standard, multiple implementations. I wish somebody would dig into why we need Rust, Zig, or something else when Ada exists. Is it just because Ada syntax is unfamilar to todays programmers or is there something fundamentally unsound about Ada?