Ada does. It has been through 5 editions so far and backwards compatibility is always maintained except for some small things that are documented and usually easy to update.
I'd normally be inclined to agree that minor things are probably good enough, but "absolute non-negotiable" is a rather strong wording and i think small things technically violate a facial reading, at least.
On the other hand, I did find what I think are the relevant docs [0] while looking more into things, so I got to learn something!
> except for some small things that are documented
I can't think of any established language that doesn't fit that exact criteria.
The last major language breakage I'm aware of was either the .Net 2 to 3 or Python 2 to 3 changes (not sure which came first). Otherwise, pretty much every language that makes a break will make it in a small fashion that's well documented.
Recently became big Ada fanboy, ironic because Im far more a fan of minimal, succinct syntax like lisp, forth, etc and I actually successfully lobbied a professor in 1993 to _not_ use it in an undergrad software engineering class lol.
Still in the honeymoon phase granted, but I'm actually terrified that we have these new defense tech startups have no clue about Ada collectively.
Your startup MVP you wants to ship a SaaS product ASAP and iterate? Sure, grab Python or JS and whatever shitstorm of libraries you want to wrestle with.
Want to play God and write code that kills?
Total category error.
The fact that I'm sure there are at least a few of these defense tech startups yolo'ing our future away with vibe coded commits when writing code that... let's not mince our words... takes human life... prob says about how far we've fallen from "engineering".
Yes it really was quite good despite all the hate it seems to get in internet comments. I used it for several years. The feature set, particularly config specs and dynamic views, was brilliant. The product was pretty mature and complete 25 years ago. I agree that administration was complicated and performance could be slow if misconfigured. We configured right, it was very intuitive and pleasant to use. IBM has effectively killed it by continuing to charge an excessive premium while adding nothing significant since they bought Rational (for Clearcase, DOORS, Apex etc.)
Sane, easily readable syntax and expressive semantics. Easy to learn. Very scalable. Suitability, by design, for low level systems programming, including microcontrollers. Suitability, by design, for
large, complex real-time applications. Easy to interface with C and other languages. Available as part of GCC. Stable and ongoing language evolution.
Consider exploring Ada 2022 as a capable successor to Algol. Its well supported in GCC and scales well from very small to very large projects. Some information is at https://learn.adacore.com/ and https://alire.ada.dev/
Ada is very scalable, suitable for everything from blinking LEDs on an AVR microcontroller board to controlling interplanetary spacecraft. Similarly, SPARK can be used incrementally, proving lower level or critical parts first.
How does this SPARK/non-SPARK mix compare to Rust's safe/unsafe mix though, in terms of both safety and pragmatism for larger non-interplanetary software? Like, for creating a CLI tool, a GUI application, a game, a web server?
I disagree. SPARK is all about using formal methods to statically prove software properties. Clippy seems more comparable to parts of AdaCore's other static analysis toolset (gnatsas). See https://docs.adacore.com/live/wave/gnatsas/html/user_guide/f...
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