GCC 9 Has Been Landing Many Ada Improvements This Week

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GCC 9 Has Been Landing Many Ada Improvements This Week

For those still making use of the venerable Ada programming language, the latest development code for GCC 9 of the GNU Compiler Collection has been seeing a number of Ada front-end improvements this week...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-9-Ada-Improvements

[jacob]

It's a pity that Ada never took off within the open source community, especially now that security is everyone's number 1 concern. Of course now we have Rust, which is better in some ways but not quite as good in others.

[totoz]

The Ada compiler is mostly developed by AdaCore, which synchronize with the GCC code base about once a year if I remember (they rebase from GCC and they push their developments to GCC). That may explain the bunch of recent commits.

The language spec still evolves, and AdaCore business is to develop and improve Ada-related tools (compiler, runtime libraries, IDE, code analyzers, ...). A part of them is Free/Open Source, while some more advanced tools are proprietary only.

This is absolutely not a "dead" language, if there may be people that think so.

[pegasus]

Some time ago (10+ years ...) I spent some time looking at Spark dialect of ADA, designed for mission critical systems that need to be formally verified. After what I learned I'm disgusted by the fact that no one outside of mission critical systems is using that knowhow, approaches and techniques. World would be a much better place ...

[starshipeleven]

Some time ago (10+ years ...) I spent some time looking at Spark dialect of ADA, designed for mission critical systems that need to be formally verified. After what I learned I'm disgusted by the fact that no one outside of mission critical systems is using that knowhow, approaches and techniques. World would be a much better place ...

I assume time of development and therefore costs would be impacted significantly if they did so.

[pegasus]

Not really. If you properly design and construct your software, much of the testing that is done today is not needed anymore. So while development phase might be longer, testing phase is usually much shorter. And much less fixing is needed on the long run.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

and moe.

[iVistux]

I assume time of development and therefore costs would be impacted significantly if they did so.

Time and cost of development would shrink, if you include the malware written for C-Programms :-)

[fuzz]

Some time ago (10+ years ...) I spent some time looking at Spark dialect of ADA, designed for mission critical systems that need to be formally verified. After what I learned I'm disgusted by the fact that no one outside of mission critical systems is using that knowhow, approaches and techniques. World would be a much better place ...

How does Rust compare in this regard?

[wizard69]

It's a pity that Ada never took off within the open source community, especially now that security is everyone's number 1 concern. Of course now we have Rust, which is better in some ways but not quite as good in others.

I tend to agree with the idea that much better languages than C exist for open source development. We have Ada, D, Rust, Swift, go, and a bunch of others but still can not displace C in the open source world. Even C++ would be a step ahead.

The problem in part is moving the mind set forward because open source needs to develop better development methods along with a new language. To put it plainly many projects end up as kludges due to submissions taken at random. Instead of designed software we get a melting pot of software. Unfortunately even though the melting pot works with people, it does not work at all with software.

The one overiding issue with Ada, Rust, Swiift and others is the lack of libraries and interfaces. One of the reasons im very hopeful for Swift is that Apple can create a very large deleoprr base that will solve this problem (at least in the case of Swift). Ada for a long time and probably still was difficukt to use under Linux simply die to the difficukty of getting it to work well with the rest of the system. Libraries for GUI's basic component database interface and so forth didnt exist or if they existed didnt work well. I can hope that thngs are better today but the fact that Ada is so seldom dicussed indicates that it probably isnt.

Id really would like to see a movement to another language in the Linux world that would displace C/C++ that the community woild ralley around. Instead we get illconcieved moves like using Javascript to try to gloss over C's issues. I look at it this way open source changes or continues to be laughed at over app quality.