In 99% of cases outside embedded, a GC'ed language would be better, but a long time ago someone started the meme that GC is slow, or that your users will notice the pauses, etc but those fears are massively overblown.
But on embedded where resources are constrained and you can't run e.g. a JVM then Rust makes sense to me, since you can eliminate a whole class of errors from the get go.
And once you have that, you might as well use it to free memory too. The idea of "Rust but GC" is fundamentally nonsense, because for GC to make sense you'd first need to rip out so much of Rust's selling point to begin with.
It mostly seems to come from a perspective of "But surely all this GC research must be good for something, right? Anything?", rather than a concrete idea of where the GC would actually help.
Not only is there of course SPARK, if one wants to do formal verification, Ada has a proven track record in things like military applications. Of course, passenger cars don't have quite the same level of care needed as military stuff (although a lot of care is still needed since cars are hundreds if not thousands of kilograms and can absolutely kill people), but I could still see Ada being useful even in the automotive industry.
PTC real time JVMs are famously used in military deployments, and you surely don't want pauses in a battleship targeting computer system (Aegis), or missile tracking system (thales).
I'm saying that not all embedded devices have the horsepower to run a JVM. Nobody's running Java on the automotive equivalent of an 8-bit AVR, for example.
>you surely don't want pauses in a battleship targeting computer system (Aegis), or missile tracking system (thales).
That'd be the 1% of times when it does matter that I alluded to previously.
In general, embedded systems suffer from severe lack of tool developer attention. People standardize on the very few things that reliably work like C, C++, and printf debugging because they don't have the bandwidth for anything more. Anything outside the beaten track has a high chance of running into showstopping bugs halfway through a project and embedded teams are already struggling to find developer time in the typical situation of 1-10 people maintaining 1M+ LOC codebases.
Rust is the first real alternative to C and C++ in decades because it's actually trying to address the ecosystem issues.
I fully agree that it's a miracle any of the existing stuff works at all. I honestly have no idea how C and C++ developers make it work. Despite being the oldest and most used languages, the tooling is atrocious.