5 ms·

Last I heard about Ada, there was the issue of having virtually no community that shares code freely, just commercial vendors selling theirs. Has that situatio

Last I heard about Ada, there was the issue of having virtually no community that shares code freely, just commercial vendors selling theirs. Has that situation improved?

inamberclad 9y ago
There's a free compiler called Gnat, but the community is still rather small. I think it's something of a catch-22. Most of the resources you'll find on the internet are old (mid-90s) blogs and educational sites. Here's some of the better ones I've found: https://www.adacore.com/gems/ https://www.adacore.com/gems/ https://blog.adacore.com/ https://blog.adacore.com/ https://two-wrongs.com/tags.html#ada https://two-wrongs.com/tags.html#ada The official reference manual is freely available too, but it's quite dense.
wiz21c 9y ago
Given the parent comment : >>> fit the the same niche (high performance, real time, and very important software I don't see any community emerging from the web any time soon :-) To me this niche means "avionics, military, nuclear, medical, spatial". Not your week-end project.
- adrianN 9y ago
  C and C++ have big communities and they're also not primarily targeted at weekend projects.
  - simias 9y ago
    They used to be, using "scripting" languages as general purpose is relatively recent development. Up until the early 2000 few people would have considered writing anything remotely CPU-intensive in Perl or Javascript. For instance I first started coding in C in high school because I wanted to write games for my calculator and the BASIC interpreter was too slow. I don't think there was an Ada compiler targeting my calculator, but there sure was a gcc port. C's history is tightly coupled with that of Unix, it's always been rather open and "hacker-friendly".
    - kqr 9y ago
      > C's history is tightly coupled with that of Unix, it's always been rather open and "hacker-friendly". I'm not sure I agree. Sure, it's reasonably easy to write your own implementation of something that closely resembles C, but C is also infamously dependent on implementation specifics and it, last I checked, had a paywalled standard. That's the opposite of open and hacker-friendly. The primary reason C feels open is, I suspect, precisely its Unix coupling. If you want to read the sources to your Unix-like OS, you're likely to find sources written in C. You'll also find system libraries with C calling conventions. If you crack open your OS, you find C. It's easy to see the connection between "open", "hacker-friendly" and "C" – but the connection is between your OS and your knowledge of C – not C itself.
      - simias 9y ago
        >You'll also find system libraries with C calling conventions. If you crack open your OS, you find C. It's easy to see the connection between "open", "hacker-friendly" and "C" – but the connection is between your OS and your knowledge of C – not C itself. You're right (and it's a bummer that the C standard is behind a paywall) but don't you think that having a large open ecosystem is more important and significant than having an open technical standard, especially when several high quality open source compiler implementations already exist? Having an open standard won't do you much good if all the tooling and libraries are closed source.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Last I heard about Ada, there was the issue of having virtually no community that shares code freely, just commercial vendors selling theirs. Has that situation improved?

inamberclad 9y ago

There's a free compiler called Gnat, but the community is still rather small. I think it's something of a catch-22. Most of the resources you'll find on the internet are old (mid-90s) blogs and educational sites. Here's some of the better ones I've found: https://www.adacore.com/gems/ https://www.adacore.com/gems/ https://blog.adacore.com/ https://blog.adacore.com/ https://two-wrongs.com/tags.html#ada https://two-wrongs.com/tags.html#ada The official reference manual is freely available too, but it's quite dense.

wiz21c 9y ago

Given the parent comment : >>> fit the the same niche (high performance, real time, and very important software I don't see any community emerging from the web any time soon :-) To me this niche means "avionics, military, nuclear, medical, spatial". Not your week-end project.

adrianN 9y ago
C and C++ have big communities and they're also not primarily targeted at weekend projects.
- simias 9y ago
  They used to be, using "scripting" languages as general purpose is relatively recent development. Up until the early 2000 few people would have considered writing anything remotely CPU-intensive in Perl or Javascript. For instance I first started coding in C in high school because I wanted to write games for my calculator and the BASIC interpreter was too slow. I don't think there was an Ada compiler targeting my calculator, but there sure was a gcc port. C's history is tightly coupled with that of Unix, it's always been rather open and "hacker-friendly".
  - kqr 9y ago
    > C's history is tightly coupled with that of Unix, it's always been rather open and "hacker-friendly". I'm not sure I agree. Sure, it's reasonably easy to write your own implementation of something that closely resembles C, but C is also infamously dependent on implementation specifics and it, last I checked, had a paywalled standard. That's the opposite of open and hacker-friendly. The primary reason C feels open is, I suspect, precisely its Unix coupling. If you want to read the sources to your Unix-like OS, you're likely to find sources written in C. You'll also find system libraries with C calling conventions. If you crack open your OS, you find C. It's easy to see the connection between "open", "hacker-friendly" and "C" – but the connection is between your OS and your knowledge of C – not C itself.
    - simias 9y ago
      >You'll also find system libraries with C calling conventions. If you crack open your OS, you find C. It's easy to see the connection between "open", "hacker-friendly" and "C" – but the connection is between your OS and your knowledge of C – not C itself. You're right (and it's a bummer that the C standard is behind a paywall) but don't you think that having a large open ecosystem is more important and significant than having an open technical standard, especially when several high quality open source compiler implementations already exist? Having an open standard won't do you much good if all the tooling and libraries are closed source.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]