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From: Tero Koskinen <tero.koskinen@iki.fi>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:16:51 +0200
Message-ID: <20070123211651.c0d43695.tero.koskinen@iki.fi>
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Date: 2007-01-23T21:16:51+02:00
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Hi,

On 22 Jan 2007 21:53:32 -0800 artifact.one@googlemail.com wrote:
> 
> My question is: how come Ada isn't more popular?
> 

I would like to throw in yet another possible reason(*) for Ada being
not popular (within the free software folks).

Currently, the only non-restricted free Ada compiler is FSF GCC/GNAT.
However, the GCC development team doesn't consider Ada to be
a release critical language, so it gets less love whenever a new GCC
is released and its quality is sometimes lower than C and C++ parts
of GCC. In addition, Ada part of GCC supports far less platforms than
C and C++ parts. (**)

So, lets imagine that you are a lead developer in an open source
project (***). One of your goals is to produce software, which will
run atleast on following systems:
 * Debian GNU/Linux 3.1: i386, IA-64, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS
 * OpenSUSE 10.2: i386, x86-64
 * OpenBSD 4.0: i386, AMD64, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC
 * FreeBSD 6.2: i386, AMD64, Alpha

The question is: Which programming language do you choose?

Ada is ruled out, because of its limited support for non-mainstream
free operating systems.

-Tero

(*) Actually, only a guess
(**) For example, platforms like OpenBSD/{arm,sparc,ppc,amd64} are
totally unsupported.
(***) Like KDE, Subversion, GTK+, or Sendmail