4 ms·

At some point maintenance was taken over by a startup, and they moved to POSIX as the primary API as a industry standard (over "RTEMS classic" which was purely

by nn3 8y ago

At some point maintenance was taken over by a startup, and they moved to POSIX as the primary API as a industry standard (over "RTEMS classic" which was purely Ada). The move to C was part of that I believe.

tombert 8y ago
Fair enough; after some cursory reading, it seems that Ada is objectively safer, so it makes me wonder why there wasn't an "Ada all the things!" movement. I suppose I'd have to do a big-ish project to know for sure how it compares to C as far as maintenance is concerned.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  Cost, culture. Ada compilers, versus Rust, used to cost a lot of money. Rust is novel so it doesn't have that historical baggage and reputation associated with it. People view Ada as verbose (it is, I won't disagree), but it's not that cumbersome (in my experience). And reading it is a pleasure compared to reading a lot of other code. From a maintenance perspective, I greatly prefer it to C. Static analysis tools and coding practices have made C and C++ safer languages than they used to be, even if they're not innately safe languages (or designed with safety in mind) as with Ada and Rust. So this mitigates the need (though drives up the costs if you want to do it right) to use a safer language in the fields that really care about safety.
- nn3 8y ago
  In the 90ies there was more a "move away from Ada movement" to avoid that language that the dod forced on the industry and for which it was hard to hire programmers for. Today it would be likely different. Also to stay pure Ada they would have needed to write a TCP stack in Ada, which would have been a big burden I guess.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > why there wasn't an "Ada all the things!" movement From the history I've read, there was. Then at some point the US DoD the most vocal member, what created a very bad culture on the Ada community (based on waterfall methodologies and government contracts) that everybody learned to avoid.
- twic 8y ago
  I suspect toolchain availability was a big thing. Every unix shipped with a C compiler, and if you didn't like it, chances are GCC, which was free, ran on your system too. AIUI, Ada toolchains have historically been commercial. GNAT was released in 1995, and i don't know how good it was, or is, compared to commercial versions.

by nn3 8y ago

tombert 8y ago

Fair enough; after some cursory reading, it seems that Ada is objectively safer, so it makes me wonder why there wasn't an "Ada all the things!" movement. I suppose I'd have to do a big-ish project to know for sure how it compares to C as far as maintenance is concerned.

Jtsummers 8y ago
Cost, culture. Ada compilers, versus Rust, used to cost a lot of money. Rust is novel so it doesn't have that historical baggage and reputation associated with it. People view Ada as verbose (it is, I won't disagree), but it's not that cumbersome (in my experience). And reading it is a pleasure compared to reading a lot of other code. From a maintenance perspective, I greatly prefer it to C. Static analysis tools and coding practices have made C and C++ safer languages than they used to be, even if they're not innately safe languages (or designed with safety in mind) as with Ada and Rust. So this mitigates the need (though drives up the costs if you want to do it right) to use a safer language in the fields that really care about safety.
nn3 8y ago
In the 90ies there was more a "move away from Ada movement" to avoid that language that the dod forced on the industry and for which it was hard to hire programmers for. Today it would be likely different. Also to stay pure Ada they would have needed to write a TCP stack in Ada, which would have been a big burden I guess.
marcosdumay 8y ago
> why there wasn't an "Ada all the things!" movement From the history I've read, there was. Then at some point the US DoD the most vocal member, what created a very bad culture on the Ada community (based on waterfall methodologies and government contracts) that everybody learned to avoid.
twic 8y ago
I suspect toolchain availability was a big thing. Every unix shipped with a C compiler, and if you didn't like it, chances are GCC, which was free, ran on your system too. AIUI, Ada toolchains have historically been commercial. GNAT was released in 1995, and i don't know how good it was, or is, compared to commercial versions.