3 ms·

Ada people scratching their heads....

marcosdumay 3y ago
Neither Ada nor Rust are completely memory-safe... and they are partially unsafe in completely different ways. But I guess people prefer the Rust explicitness.
- projektfu 3y ago
  Ada is safe if you never free memory explicitly. The story for reclaiming memory without GC was always a little weird, basically pool allocation by type. But it does bounds checking, counted strings, and has a reasonably rich type system that allows variants and things in a safe way.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Ada has Controlled types, so the memory reclaiming story can be similar to C++/Rust RAII. What it's missing compared to Rust is the lifetime and borrow checking.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
How many of them are left? I thought it was very much a dead language
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  There are still plenty of Ada devs around, but they're almost all in the DoD or working for defense contractors.
- chasil 3y ago
  Far from it. "SQL/PSM (SQL/Persistent Stored Modules) is an ISO standard mainly defining an extension of SQL with a procedural language for use in stored procedures... SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language. However, Oracle has maintained a distance from the standard in its documentation. IBM's SQL PL (used in DB2) and Mimer SQL's PSM were the first two products officially implementing SQL/PSM. It is commonly thought that these two languages, and perhaps also MySQL/MariaDB's procedural language, are closest to the SQL/PSM standard. However, a PostgreSQL addon implements SQL/PSM (alongside its other procedural languages like the PL/SQL-derived plpgsql), although it is not part of the core product." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM
- timbit42 3y ago
  It's still very popular in air traffic control. Some older NASA and military projects used it and are still in use.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  As I understand, there's a very long tail of continued Ada use in military and aviation. So depends on your definition of "dead"
- trealira 3y ago
  Nvidia uses it: https://blog.adacore.com/nvidia-security-team-what-if-we-just-stopped-using-c https://blog.adacore.com/nvidia-security-team-what-if-we-jus...
38529977thrw 3y ago
It is odd since Ada is DoD's (bastard?) child and NSA is DoD but a little digging you get this from 1997 (with a singular mention of the word "safety"): https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/3 https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/3 tldr; seems to be that the software development world has changed from the days that DoD was the "dominant" software developer, and Ada in the interim did not get adopted by the commercial sector (with safety critical exceptions in aerospace, etc. noted).

Neither Ada nor Rust are completely memory-safe... and they are partially unsafe in completely different ways. But I guess people prefer the Rust explicitness.

projektfu 3y ago
Ada is safe if you never free memory explicitly. The story for reclaiming memory without GC was always a little weird, basically pool allocation by type. But it does bounds checking, counted strings, and has a reasonably rich type system that allows variants and things in a safe way.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Ada has Controlled types, so the memory reclaiming story can be similar to C++/Rust RAII. What it's missing compared to Rust is the lifetime and borrow checking.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

How many of them are left? I thought it was very much a dead language

HideousKojima 3y ago
There are still plenty of Ada devs around, but they're almost all in the DoD or working for defense contractors.
chasil 3y ago
Far from it. "SQL/PSM (SQL/Persistent Stored Modules) is an ISO standard mainly defining an extension of SQL with a procedural language for use in stored procedures... SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language. However, Oracle has maintained a distance from the standard in its documentation. IBM's SQL PL (used in DB2) and Mimer SQL's PSM were the first two products officially implementing SQL/PSM. It is commonly thought that these two languages, and perhaps also MySQL/MariaDB's procedural language, are closest to the SQL/PSM standard. However, a PostgreSQL addon implements SQL/PSM (alongside its other procedural languages like the PL/SQL-derived plpgsql), although it is not part of the core product." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL/PSM
timbit42 3y ago
It's still very popular in air traffic control. Some older NASA and military projects used it and are still in use.
sneed_chucker 3y ago
As I understand, there's a very long tail of continued Ada use in military and aviation. So depends on your definition of "dead"
trealira 3y ago
Nvidia uses it: https://blog.adacore.com/nvidia-security-team-what-if-we-just-stopped-using-c https://blog.adacore.com/nvidia-security-team-what-if-we-jus...

38529977thrw 3y ago

It is odd since Ada is DoD's (bastard?) child and NSA is DoD but a little digging you get this from 1997 (with a singular mention of the word "safety"): https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/3 https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/3 tldr; seems to be that the software development world has changed from the days that DoD was the "dominant" software developer, and Ada in the interim did not get adopted by the commercial sector (with safety critical exceptions in aerospace, etc. noted).