id Tech 4 / Doom 3 Is Being Rewritten In Ada

[ldo17]

The issue in IoT is not solvable by ADA. Bad code is bad code, even a better language won't help much when the device is sending around master keys as plain text or has blank root passwords.

Still, you notice a lot of effort goes into ASLR and other things to try to mitigate the effects of holes. Ada could help with that.

[polarathene]

People do like to do stuff like this to learn, experiment or create portfolio work to help get them land roles. Where I live the market is rather competitive, I saw an entry job the other day that expected previous programming experience in addition to a finance degree. A recruiter contacted me the other day for some role that required Rust, how much years? oh 3. Goodluck finding that in this country when Rust only went stable in mid 2015, sounds like a hype hire where the employer/recruiter doesn't know much about it. Would love for years of experience to be less important of a requirement for roles as I don't believe it's a good metric. Someone else could demonstrate skills elsewhere that could have them pick up Rust or expand on whatever experience they already have with the language.

How does Rust compare to Ada?

[pal666]

The new C++ stuff has made it harder to read

for you. for most people ada is harder to read

You can't get much more modern that Ada 2012, until Ada 202X comes out.

lol, did i say it is obsolete?

It was designed for embedded work, games are also considered embedded, especially on consoles.

c++ is most used embedded language

No bit masks required, you can define your types such as registers in records and let the compiler handle the shifting and masking, it'll do a better job and it's less error-prone.

c++ has bitfields

Hierarchical storage pools so memory can be allocated in large blocks in one go at the start of an application and then given out in further sub-blocks which are then used for allocations.

you have full control over allocation in c++

Has built-in tasking and will tell you if there can be any potential locks anywhere.

ada supports some restricted subset of multithreading.

Define the ranges your types can work within and have the compiler check them, a lot at compile time. The checks can be turned off once the application has proved it cannot cause any errors.

c++ can do this for any type and for any kind of restriction, not just simple ranges

It's on par speed-wise with C++ even with the checks on, as the compiler may deem a check unnecessary anyway and won't put it in.

it is slower than c++

It's higher level so you don't need to constantly think in pointers or ints as you model your types to correctly map onto the concept you are trying to model.

it is not higher level. ada lacks lower level, but c++ can be as high as you like.

Has a proper module system so the compiler doesn't spend time constantly compiling the same code over and over, like with C/C++ includes / templates.#

well, most time compiler spends on optimization, not on parsing headers and the whole point of templates is that they are not compiled separately, but i grant you this one. module system will improve c++ and c++ will get one soon(sooner than ada 202x lol)

Has generics - that's templates to you, they're less messy than C++'s, but you can't do meta-programming in them, which is painful anyway.

so lousy language can't do metaprogramming, powerful language can. now c++ can do it even better with constexpr(see boost.hana)

Oh, and it was not designed by committee, like so many people love to shout about, the original version was designed by one person and his team of people, Ada95 by another one person, Ada 2012 by a further one person. There are people who have a vote on things, but that's about it on that.

oh and you are crazy. it was designed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_O..._Working_Group and now it is same iso standard as c++. but i don't know why do you bring this here, everything of value was designed by committee. (no, you can't say "but this feature was designed by one person", whole thing is work of a group and it is not a bad thing)

I worked in games and had to use C and C++ which I liked at the time, but back then with the pressures and crap tools (MSVC 6) I spent most of the time in a debugger, I don't like debugging.

i have bad news for you. most people working in games are bad c++ programmers. and of course msvc 6 was not a real c++ compiler

we need more people taking a real interest

that is your problem. nobody is interested in ada and you can't influence it

We need more people writing unencumbered libraries, bindings, i.e. without a GPLv3 licence.

exactly. nobody writes libraries in ada, so nobody will use ada.

We need more tools, more diversity in tools and in areas people are using it for.

yes, lack of tools also makes language unattractive

it's a Turing complete language and can be used for anything

assembler and branfuck are turing complete too

[pal666]

Still, you notice a lot of effort goes into ASLR and other things to try to mitigate the effects of holes. Ada could help with that.

c++ also could help with that and it does not require full rewrite. just forbid working with raw pointers

[pal666]

ok, so people are touting ada as safe language for aerospace

On June 4, 1996, after 7 billion dollars of development, an unmanned Ariane 5 rocket exploded just forty seconds after lift-off
The rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million for a total cost of 7.5 billion dollars!
The error was traced to a software component in the Inertial Reference System that had been reused from the Ariane 4 flight software
The reused component was more than 10 years old and had flown successfully on numerous Ariane 4 flights
The problem => certain assumptions changed between the Ariane 4 and the Ariane 5 and the software was not updated in response
The flight software was written in Ada which has a first class exception construct (it predates C++ and Java in this regard)
If an exception is thrown but not caught, the error will “percolate” up through the call stack and will eventually terminate the entire system
The failure of the Ariane 5 can be traced to the conversion of a 64-bit integer to a 16-bit signed integer
The 64-bit value was greater than 2^15 which caused an exception to be generated
This exception was not caught and it caused the termination of the flight control software 37 seconds into the launch
The rocket shortly thereafter (3 seconds) lost control and was destroyed

[ldo17]

If an exception is thrown but not caught, the error will “percolate” up through the call stack and will eventually terminate the entire system

What do you think C code would have done?

[pal666]

in the meantime c++ flies to mars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SdSKZFoUa8

[pal666]

What do you think C code would have done?

i don't suggest writing software in c. c++ could do many things, including what ada did

[pal666]

Because games never crash, do they?

because if game crashes you fix it. and you don't write games in ada because you want them fast and you want them now

They don't ever go out of bounds on arrays or start dicking with memory they don't own, do they?
Oh and C and C++ adding bounds checking various forms, well that's not safety related at all is it?

c++ can do any kind of checking, not just array bounds. and it can do many checks at compile time. you can avoid checking if you want, but you just as well can avoid ada. and it is easier to forbid to avoid checking than to rewrite in some obscure language without tools, libraries and developers

By your reasoning Doom engine shouldn't be written on those languages either

by my reasoning you are idiot and doom should be written in modern c++

[pal666]

so, failed c++ programmers become ada programmers who are crying at lack of libraries, tools and developers.
well, people who don't understand that mistakes are made by people, can't succeed at any language