Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Except dynamic memory allocation, which in Ada either needs a GC or is unsafe.


Stuck in Ada 83?

Ada compilers never used GC, and it was eventually dropped from the standard.

Since Ada 95, that RAII is supported via controlled types.

Additionally in many cases like strings and vectors, the compiler does the memory managment for us anyway.


And rust is unsafe if you use unsafe rust (or even if you use Arc in safe rust and reference count incorrectly).

Ada doesn’t use allocation, remaining 100% memory safe.


Erm it is perfectly possible to perform dynamic allocation in Ada. You have the 'new' keyword to allocate a new object of a type. You have the 'unchecked deallocation' mechanism. You have controlled types that deallocate when an object is out of scope. You have all sorts of weak references schemes in some libraries. You have storage pools to handle allocation specifics for a type. You have the secondary stack that handles returning objects of unknown-size-at-call-site.

Most of those can be disabled though through the 'restriction' mechanism (look up Pragma Restriction which is very interesting in itself).

SPARK itself can handle and prove some ownership properties but to the best of my knowledge isn't at the level of rust in memory safety on dynamically allocated memory.


> SPARK itself can handle and prove some ownership properties but to the best of my knowledge isn't at the level of rust in memory safety on dynamically allocated memory.

It actually is: https://www.adacore.com/uploads/techPapers/Safe-Dynamic-Memo...

And using https://www.adacore.com/sparkpro as a reference (ignore the 'Pro' bit as it's also available in the GPL edition) - anything certified to SPARK Silver level is far safer than any Rust code out there.


Seems I missed some of the progress... Things are moving fast these days.


> And rust is unsafe if you use unsafe rust (or even if you use Arc in safe rust and reference count incorrectly).

I don't believe it's possible to cause unsafety using Arc in safe Rust. I don't know what "reference count incorrectly" means here. Could you explain?


I believe they are referring to memory leaks. Not really a "safety concern" as it will simply cause the application to crash (eventually).


Arc in safe Rust won't let you cause use-after-free no matter how much you screw up.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: