Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

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> if rust ever settles down I think it would be great for aerospace 178b and other standards for aircraft. Also cars :)

I imagine the compiler situation would need to change before this could become a possibility. I doubt off-the-shelf Rust/LLVM is appropriate for compiling life-and-death code.

I imagine it would also be necessary to strictly control memory management, using pools rather than doing the equivalent of malloc/free. It seems Rust has a crate for that: https://docs.rs/heapless/0.5.5/heapless/

> I've only ever met one engineer who actually liked coding in Ada.

It certainly lacks many luxuries. For that matter, it also lacks basic examples. I tried to dabble with Ada recently, and pretty quickly ran into trouble (I was unable to figure out how to instantiate any of GNAT's 'bounded containers').

Would you mind sharing which bounded container you tried to instantiate and what the problem was?

I wasn't able to instantiate any of them, I couldn't figure out the proper syntax. There are no examples anywhere that show how to used them.

Is this the kind of example you were looking for?

    with Ada.Text_IO;                    use Ada.Text_IO;
    with Ada.Containers.Bounded_Vectors;

    procedure Main is
       package BV_Integer is new
         Ada.Containers.Bounded_Vectors (Index_Type   => Positive,
                                         Element_Type => Integer);
       use BV_Integer;

       Vec_Max : constant := 10;
       Vec     : Vector (Vec_Max);
    begin
       Put_Line ("Appending some numbers...");
       for I in 1 .. Vec_Max loop
          Vec.Append (Integer (I));
       end loop;
       
       Put_Line ("Appending another number...");
       Vec.Append (Vec_Max + 1);   --  this raises an exception.
    end Main;

Yes, thanks. Perhaps I was just missing Vec : Vector (Vec_Max);. I'll give this a go on GNAT some time.

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