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GNAT has existed since at least the mid-90s, and in that time period plenty of companies used non-OSS compilers. In that era, the largest blocker for Ada was i
by jghn 6mo ago
GNAT has existed since at least the mid-90s, and in that time period plenty of companies used non-OSS compilers.
In that era, the largest blocker for Ada was it ws viewed as having a lot of overhead for things that weren't generally seen as useful (safety guarantees). The reputation was it only mattered if you were working on military stuff, etc.
- adrian_b 6mo agoTrue, but at that time it was already too late. C/C++ had won. Moreover, for a very long time GNAT had been quite difficult to build, configure and coexist with other gcc-based compilers, far more difficult than building and configuring the tool chain for any other programming language. (i.e. you could fail to get a working environment, without any easy way to discover what went wrong, which never happened with any other programming language supported by gcc) I have no idea which was the reason for this, because whichever was the reason it had nothing to do with any intrinsic property of the language. I do not remember when it has finally become easy to use Ada with gcc, but this might have happened only a decade ago, or even more recently.
- budman1 6mo agothe gnat people needed to make a living. there were several impediments to widespread use of gnat, like the runtime license. not that it was their responsibility to provide a free compiler to the masses.