feels like ADA
I wasn't sarcastic or trolling, but I understand it's hard to know with a cryptic 3 words sentence.
ps: I gathered some thoughts. It reminded me of ADA because it's designed to be low-level, yet embed high-level concepts and typing (generics).
I also like Rust. I haven't tested it yet (will try it) but the first impressions are good. But I think Rust will not be on par with ADA 2012 until it supports range values (like x : Integer Range 1..100) and contracts at least.
Asserts are good for the beginning but a language for really big software should have verification mechanisms which are implemented in SPARK (a subset of ADA).
http://doc.rust-lang.org/doc/rust.html#typestate-system
The way I understand them (and I say this a lot, but I could be wrong) is that it's like a more powerful version of Eiffel's design by contract, which allows the compiler to test whether invariants hold at compile time rather than just throwing assertions at runtime.
E.g. SPARK allows static verification of bounded memory usage, which I am not sure if rust's `check` is able to express.
AFAICT this requires forbidding recursion, unbounded loops and use of heap allocators or types/procedures which in turn have access to such facilities.
Or somewhat equivalently: the SPARK subset of Ada is statically verifiable by not being turing complete, so bits of the code can be verified, and elsewhere the full Ada language can be used.
I am not sure if Rust can emulate this.
(Again, I am not an Ada/SPARK developer so all of what I wrote may be wrong, do not take life decisions based on what I write)
Another option (addon) would be to use commented invariants like in SPARK which are tested against the code by an automatic verification system even before compile time. To get an impression what it means, please read:
http://www.adacore.com/home/products/sparkpro/tokeneer/disco...