4 ms·

"I have a hard time imagining an experience even remotely described as unusable." Ok, so i should give FSF GNAT a try then. I always tried AdaCore's package. I

by sai_c 6y ago

"I have a hard time imagining an experience even remotely described as unusable." Ok, so i should give FSF GNAT a try then. I always tried AdaCore's package. It's unfortunate that comp.lang.ada isn't available anymore. I think there were quite some not so fun bugs reported. Anyhow. I had a look at https://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/comparison https://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/comparison. What strikes me as odd is only support for x86 Windows/linux/MAC for the Community Edition. No ARM Linux (say Raspberry Pi)? That sure is not what it looks like, no? I really don't want to pester you, but did you ever use Ada in a commercial setting and can you share your experience if so? I'm generally interested in Ada (i have a look at it every year or so), but the consensus on comp.lang.ada always was "for commercial usage you really should buy a commercial license (no matter the project, no matter from which company)". Which more or less always meant AdaCore (some were suggesting Janus Ada, because of the moderate pricing) if you want an Ada compiler which supports the latest standard. Also, because AdaCore seems to be top dog in this area, with other vendors differing wildly in quality of compiler and libs. I don't know if any of this is true, but those were the vibes from comp.lang.ada i received.

foerbert 6y ago
I haven't used Ada in a commercial setting, unfortunately. I was never that involved with comp.lang.ada so I can't really comment there. However I never really got that impression from freenode #ada. Based on what I heard there, I'd describe it more like "if you don't know that you need it, you don't need it." I also got the impression comp.lang.ada tended to be a bit more um... conservative, if you will. I'm not so surprised to hear they were more inclined to have a commercial license. Personally speaking with my own experiences and what I saw on #ada I'd be comfortable going without a commercial license. I've only ever seen problems with somewhat odd situations, and I'm pretty sure all of them produced a bug box (compiler error message) so at least I was aware of the situation. And Ada often has multiple reasonable ways of doing something, so even if the odd/clever thing causes an error it's unlikely to be a blocker. Mostly it means I would have to put up with usage that's a little more not to my taste.
- sai_c 6y ago
  "I also got the impression comp.lang.ada tended to be a bit more um... conservative, if you will." Hehe, yes definitely. But considering the projects some of the participants worked on, i can understand why. For those projects you do need a specific mindset. So, thanks for sharing your experience. I will try the FSF version. Maybe this is the path forward for my personal projects (which might end up commercial ;-) ).

by sai_c 6y ago

foerbert 6y ago

I haven't used Ada in a commercial setting, unfortunately. I was never that involved with comp.lang.ada so I can't really comment there. However I never really got that impression from freenode #ada. Based on what I heard there, I'd describe it more like "if you don't know that you need it, you don't need it." I also got the impression comp.lang.ada tended to be a bit more um... conservative, if you will. I'm not so surprised to hear they were more inclined to have a commercial license. Personally speaking with my own experiences and what I saw on #ada I'd be comfortable going without a commercial license. I've only ever seen problems with somewhat odd situations, and I'm pretty sure all of them produced a bug box (compiler error message) so at least I was aware of the situation. And Ada often has multiple reasonable ways of doing something, so even if the odd/clever thing causes an error it's unlikely to be a blocker. Mostly it means I would have to put up with usage that's a little more not to my taste.

sai_c 6y ago
"I also got the impression comp.lang.ada tended to be a bit more um... conservative, if you will." Hehe, yes definitely. But considering the projects some of the participants worked on, i can understand why. For those projects you do need a specific mindset. So, thanks for sharing your experience. I will try the FSF version. Maybe this is the path forward for my personal projects (which might end up commercial ;-) ).