Franciszek Czekała:
Insistance on formal tools is a misunderstanding that leads to
design bloat and eventually failure (Ada).
D competes directly with C++ as Ada did before. Ada drowned
under the weight of its "safety" and so will D if it goes the
same route. The only thing needed now are mature compilers and
good systems API integration. If anything I would rather
consider removing features from the language than adding them.
Ada has not "failed", it's a niche language, but at the moment in
its niche (high integrity code) it's used and I think there its
usage is growing. (And Ada is used far more than D, there are
many important system that use Ada, unlike D).
I think the usage of formal tools is slowly growing (despite
being tiny).
Probably Ada has failed to become more widespread mostly because
its syntax requires to write too much code and to state too many
things two times. And because it's Pascal-like. And maybe a bit
because of its military origins too.
And while Ada/Spark are safe, there are more modern ways to
obtain some safety that require to write less code. You see this
a little even in Rust.
D is not half as safe as Ada, D is C-derived, D syntax allows to
write code quite more succinct than C# code. So comparing Ada and
D, despite D likes some extra safety compared to C++, is not so
meaningful.
Bye,
bearophile
