donallen

I've written a fair amount of code in Rust and D and a little less in Zig. In my opinion, Zig was not ready for prime time when I used it -- too many bugs -- and that may still be true. Rust is hard to learn and even after you do, it gets in the way a lot. D is very nice if you like C, but there are a lot of problems with the project and the tooling.

I'm about to say something that will likely surprise you; it surprised me: have you folks thought about Ada? I was around, working on (D)ARPA contracts at BBN, when Ada was designed. We didn't use it, so I had no opinion of it at the time. I thought it had dried up and blown away in the decades since, like PL1.

Well, it's now #17 on the Tiobe index and climbing. So I gave it a try for a small project. My reaction is very positive. The language is well-designed, obviously having learned a lot of lessons from the mistakes of C, among other things. The compiler, gnat, is built on gcc. Compilation times are very fast, execution times are fast, it works well with gdb, and it's well documented. It avoids many of the traps of C (no pointer arithmetic, no automatic type conversions) and it just feels carefully engineered. It's been used to build a lot of applications in areas like train control and aviation where you just can't screw up because people may die if you do.

Based on my experience with writing and debugging a little over a thousand lines of code (so not a lot), I'm very impressed -- it's surprisingly good. I'd suggest giving it consideration if/when the opportunity presents itself.