I put Rust aside for now, but I like it. I am focusing on SPARK and Elixir/Nerves for now. I bought the book, "Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK", and followed along with the AdaCore resources, and it is amazing. Rust will not be there for a while, but this is exciting. I am happy to see goals being more important than choice of PL here.
This article sort of put me over the edge to pursue SPARK [1]. For those who comment on verbosity or similarity to COBOL, I can say as an APL/J fan, and somebody who loves concise code with a mathy slant, SPARK is a great way to create high-integrity software with tooling along the whole development chain.
I will be working on a controls system, and Rust is just not there yet to commit to it, but I will certainly keep my eye on this great team up between AdaCore and Ferrous Systems!
I am not in the field, this is my personal project with some others.
I started programming in 1978, and I was building circuits back in the 80s and 90s with relays (ladder logic) and later with PLC's and small microcontrollers (The Parallax BASIC Stamp, PIC chips, then AVRs and others).
I got into stage machinery, and the entertainment engineering industry, and I have experience with several show controller software packages. I was the "Show Manager" at "The House of Dancing Water" show in Macau for 6 years for the owner, not production, and was diving and servicing the hydraulics, electrical, and some of the aerial rigging on ropes. I also coded high-level HMIs and troubleshot low-level drive code that interfaces to the show control software. As you can imagine, a 40,000 lbf hydraulically-operated, underwater stage lifts (8 lifts with 8m stroke cylinders, 7m submerged, 1m dry) is very safety-critical when you have people on, below, and above them with multiple pinch points, etc.
I know some industrial automation folk are using Elixir and Nerves with Web interfaces. I was used to QNX OS, which the show control software ran on top. Certified hardware and software is necessary to meet strict machinery and show control systems engineering. Raspberry Pis and Arduinos don't have that level of QA/QC yet, although, I have seen them patched on to systems, which to me is waiting for something to happen before it becomes a codified guideline.
I am still playing with SPARK 2014 and I would be very interested if AdaCore and Ferrous Systems bring Rust up to the same ecosystem as Ada and SPARK have now. Confession: personal bias is that I am not a fan of the complexity of Rust, but syntax is Ok. I see you like Haskell. I always wished Haskell would get more practical support for control systems. I've looked into F* (not F#) as a possible piece of the puzzle. Right now, SPARK 2014 is pretty neat, and the ecosystem is a full package.
I like Erlang, and I was pulling for LFE vs. Elixir, but it looks like Elixir has taken off. Nerves/Elixir looks very interesting for distributed edge-device computing with web interfaces.
