id Tech 4 / Doom 3 Is Being Rewritten In Ada

[CanuteTheGreat]

For comparison, the life-support system on the International Space Station is written in Ada. Would you trust your life to anything else?

No, I would not. Having first encountered Ada as an undergrad many moons ago, I cannot think of a better language to use for something that is absolutely mission critical. That's probably why Ada is used in trains, aircraft, and manufacturing.

[starshipeleven]

Maybe it could be useful for newer applications like IoT etc, where security is proving to be a serious headache.

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.

[sjukfan]

For comparison, the life-support system on the International Space Station is written in Ada. Would you trust your life to anything else?

[pmorph]

Entertainment for Mars mission, check.

[Michael]

This crap site cannot handle large responses that take a bit of time to write, can it?

It just went into a moderation queue to ensure it wasn't spam and has now been cleared.

[mmstick]

Also, Rust fails in the readability department as well as C++, both are hideous to read due to the overuse of symbols all over the place. The new C++ stuff has made it harder to read and both C++ and Rust make my head hurt.

That's only true if you're talking about Rust 0.8-alpha and prior. All of the unique pointer symbols were dropped before the 1.0 release in favour of having them as enums instead. It's entirely dishonest to continue stating that Rust has readability issues or overuse of symbols, and even moreso when you claim that Rust makes your head hurt (which implies that you know nothing about Rust and therefore are an unreliable source for Rust's point of view).

By far, Rust is much more readable than both C and C++. I would even say that it's more readable than Ada because the higher level functional programming aspects make it trivial to express complex functionality on a single line. If you want to point to benchmarksgame entries, I can also do the same to show Rust beating Ada/C.

[bison]

I wouldnt call it obsolete, there is a niche that ADA still fills well.

As for the rewrite i have to wonder if the process has uncovered many bugs in the original engines code base. Coosing to rewrite something in ADA or a modern language such as Rust or Swift has that potential.

And the first invocation of Mozilla's Law goes to post number 10!

In case you're not familiar with it, Mozilla's Law asserts that "As an online discussion of software grows longer, the probability of someone suggesting it should be rewritten in Rust approaches 1."

[efikkan]

People are allowed to have hobbies, there are lots of less useful projects out there, including Haiku, ReactOS, Hurd, and approx. 700 crappy game engines. It might still provide some kind of experience for someone even if it doesn't lead to some kind of useful product, and learning the hard way that something is a bad idea can be useful. It's also better that beginners get some experience before contributing to more serious projects, or even become a professional coder. I always encourage developers to get as much experience as possible.

As for someone who has experience both with Ada and game engines, it's certainly something I would never combine. If someone wants to create an efficient engine they should rather do it in clean C with cache optimized/data oriented design. But of course, those are tools for grownups, not for the kids thinking they can do everything better in Rust…

[pal666]

considering that Ada is regularly beating modern languages in terms of speed, readability, and especially memory usage

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian....php?test=nbody
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian....st=binarytrees

now go learn something

considering on both your links ada is beaten by c++ i would conclude that you have no clue about anything. now go learn something

[pal666]

You know absolutely nothing. Ada is not obsolete and is being used in more and more safety oriented areas due to the features mentioned below.

you are absolutely idiot. doom engine is not safety oriented area