I think Ada not being very popular shows that the need for a memory safe non-garbage collected language is kind of overstated. If there was really that much of a need, people would have flocked to Ada despite its shortcomings.
Most people solved the safety problem a long time ago by switching to garbage collected languages. As times go on and garbage collector designs get better while hardware gets beefier you can get away with using a garbage collected language in more and more cases. Case in point golang marketing itself as a system programming language and succeeding, not to even mention even the game dev accepting C# these days.
To be clear, there is a niche and need for safe and non-garbadge collected languages and there will always be. I am just saying the niche is much smaller than people might think.
I think it is mistake for Rust evangelists to market safety of the killer-feature of the language. Rust is not popular because of the safety but because it lowered the barriers of entry for a new generation of system programmers by providing excellent tooling, error messages and a type system that take at least the lower hanging fruits of the academic functional world. That is all cool stuff beyond the safety circle jerk.
Most people solved the safety problem a long time ago by switching to garbage collected languages. As times go on and garbage collector designs get better while hardware gets beefier you can get away with using a garbage collected language in more and more cases. Case in point golang marketing itself as a system programming language and succeeding, not to even mention even the game dev accepting C# these days.
To be clear, there is a niche and need for safe and non-garbadge collected languages and there will always be. I am just saying the niche is much smaller than people might think.
I think it is mistake for Rust evangelists to market safety of the killer-feature of the language. Rust is not popular because of the safety but because it lowered the barriers of entry for a new generation of system programmers by providing excellent tooling, error messages and a type system that take at least the lower hanging fruits of the academic functional world. That is all cool stuff beyond the safety circle jerk.