You seem to be arguing as if this effort should have gone to Ada instead. So go ahead and do it. There's a group of people who are trying to get kernel support for Rust. This is not a statement about Rust being superior to Ada or Ada's (in)suitability for the same job. It's only a statement that this group of people likes rust for it's safety features. I'm sure they are all aware that there are other, even safer languages, but these people like Rust.
We can lead academic discussions about which language is safer/better/leaner/whatever-er, but the fact is that Rust has a larger and growing mindshare so this effort is unsurprising. For Ada, the solution isn't to try and prove to anonymous forum goers it would've been better choice if only people recognized the fact. The solution is to mobilize the Ada community to put the same amount of effort into the publicity and marketing (yes, the bad M word) of their ecosystem.
Ada clearly lives on in many safety critical systems, but judging by the admittedly biased topic frequency on HN and other technical sites, it has a tiny community who mostly keep to themselves. That's fine, but then don't be surprised when it's Hip Language X that gets the headlines and these sort of efforts.
We can lead academic discussions about which language is safer/better/leaner/whatever-er, but the fact is that Rust has a larger and growing mindshare so this effort is unsurprising. For Ada, the solution isn't to try and prove to anonymous forum goers it would've been better choice if only people recognized the fact. The solution is to mobilize the Ada community to put the same amount of effort into the publicity and marketing (yes, the bad M word) of their ecosystem.
Ada clearly lives on in many safety critical systems, but judging by the admittedly biased topic frequency on HN and other technical sites, it has a tiny community who mostly keep to themselves. That's fine, but then don't be surprised when it's Hip Language X that gets the headlines and these sort of efforts.