>> Is it really a new class of language considering we had Ada / SPARK for ages? It takes safety further, too, with formal verification.
Rust and Ada have similar goals and target use cases, but different advantages and strengths.
In my opinion, Rust's biggest innovations are 1) borrow checking and "mutation XOR sharing" built into the language, effectively removing the need for manual memory management or garbage collection, 2) Async/Await in a low-level systems language, and 3) Superb tooling via cargo, clippy, built-in unit tests, and the crates ecosystem (in a systems programming language!) Rust may not have been the first with these features, but it did make them popular together in a way that works amazingly well. It is a new class of language due to the use of the borrow checker to avoid memory safety problems.
Ada's strengths are its 1) powerful type system (custom integer types, use of any enumerated type as an index, etc.), 2) perfect fit for embedded programming with representation clauses, the real-time systems annex, and the high integrity systems annex, 3) built-in Design-by-Contract preconditions, postconditions, and invariants, and 4) Tasking built into the language / run-time. Compared to Rust, Ada feels a bit clunky and the tooling varies greatly from one Ada implementation to another. However, for some work, Ada is the only choice because Rust does not have sufficently qualified toolchains yet. (Hopefully soon . . .)
Both languages have great foreign function interfaces and are relatively easy to use with C compared to some other programming languages. Having done a fair bit of C programming in the past, today I would always choose Rust over C or C++ when given the choice.
Rust and Ada have similar goals and target use cases, but different advantages and strengths.
In my opinion, Rust's biggest innovations are 1) borrow checking and "mutation XOR sharing" built into the language, effectively removing the need for manual memory management or garbage collection, 2) Async/Await in a low-level systems language, and 3) Superb tooling via cargo, clippy, built-in unit tests, and the crates ecosystem (in a systems programming language!) Rust may not have been the first with these features, but it did make them popular together in a way that works amazingly well. It is a new class of language due to the use of the borrow checker to avoid memory safety problems.
Ada's strengths are its 1) powerful type system (custom integer types, use of any enumerated type as an index, etc.), 2) perfect fit for embedded programming with representation clauses, the real-time systems annex, and the high integrity systems annex, 3) built-in Design-by-Contract preconditions, postconditions, and invariants, and 4) Tasking built into the language / run-time. Compared to Rust, Ada feels a bit clunky and the tooling varies greatly from one Ada implementation to another. However, for some work, Ada is the only choice because Rust does not have sufficently qualified toolchains yet. (Hopefully soon . . .)
Both languages have great foreign function interfaces and are relatively easy to use with C compared to some other programming languages. Having done a fair bit of C programming in the past, today I would always choose Rust over C or C++ when given the choice.