News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ada's Dependent Types, and Its Types as a Whole by zozbot234 on Saturday December 28, 2024 @06:21AM (#42530247)
I would quibble with the "fairly easily" part. It will likely become possible to make them as ergonomic as the Ada variety if Rust's const generic and constant evaluation facilities are extended far enough, but this would also open up the can of worms of essentially giving Rust the full capabilities of a dependently-typed language (at least in its compile-time subset), which Rust's dev community may not necessarily be OK with.
Re:Ada's Dependent Types, and Its Types as a Whole by Yoric on Saturday December 28, 2024 @12:44PM (#42532766)
I'll grant you that Rust is not nearly as ergonomic as Ada in this domain, but doing it manually is fairly easy. Turning it into a library is a bit more complicated - these days, I'd do it with macros. Of course, making sure that the compiler knows about it for optimization purposes would require lots of const generic.
Re:Ada's Dependent Types, and Its Types as a Whole by kevlar700 on Saturday December 28, 2024 @06:46PM (#42535961)
The real benefit of Adas typing is that it is so easy to utilise often preventing logic errors.
Re:Ada's Dependent Types, and Its Types as a Whole by Yoric on Saturday December 28, 2024 @07:41PM (#42536299)
And this is definitely a strong benefit.

The benefit of Rust's typing is that (in the absence of `unsafe` or bugs in the compiler or stdlib), it's a simple theorem prover. Much less powerful than the theorem provers you can use with SPARK, but it's a start :)