Re: A few questions on Ada and Ada implementations

[Tero Koskinen <tero.koskinen@iki.fi>]

On 18 Dec 2010 23:21:41 -0000 Kulin Remailer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been looking over Ada (the 95 variant) and it looks like a great
> language.
...
> What Ada toolchains are available for 64 bit Linux that can be used to
> generate 32 or 64 bit Linux/UNIX executables that are in a hobbyist's price
> range (let's say up to 1000 USD).

I think your choices are following:
1)
  GCC/GNAT from FSF (http://gcc.gnu.org/).
  It is distributed under GMGPL (similar to LGPL) so you can link to it
  without needing to license your own program/binary under GPL.
  Available for almost every platform/architecture.

2)
  GNAT GPL from AdaCore (http://libre.adacore.com/)
  It is distributed under plain GPL, so it infects GPL into your
  binaries. In some cases, you might need to license the source
  also under GPL, but it is not entirely clear to me what those
  cases are. Available for Linux/Mac/Windows at least.

3)
  Janus/Ada from RRSoftware (http://www.rrsoftware.com/)
  Personal edition costs about $300 and professional edition $500.
  It is available for 32-bit Windows only, but I have succesfully
  ran it under Wine on 64-bit and 32-bit Fedora 14, and on 64-bit
  Windows 7. The latest stable release (3.1.1d) is somewhat buggy,
  so be sure that you negotiate free update to the next release
  (I have beta version of 3.1.2 and it is much better than 3.1.1d).

4)
  ObjectAda from Aonix (http://www.atego.com/products/aonix-objectada-for-linux/)
  Aonix (now Atego) folks might be able to provide you a feature
  limited version of their ObjectAda compiler for free. I have seen
  full compiler price being somewhere between $3k and $10k.
  I have ObjectAda V7.2.2 Special Edition (2k LOC limit per file)
  for Windows and while it works, the source code limitation is
  slightly annoying.

5)
  ICC Ada from Irvine (http://www.irvine.com/).
  I am pretty sure that they have a Linux version of their compiler
  or they can at least with relatively small effort create a version
  which generates binaries for 32/64-bit Linux (i386/x86_64).
  Although, I don't know are they selling the Linux version or is it
  just for internal use. I have tested their time limited version of
  Ada 2005 compiler for Windows and it was pretty good. It was able
  to spot some of my coding errors which GNAT couldn't find.

> Do they include any data base bindings?

I think only GNAT/Adacore provides database bindings. With others
you need to use bindings from 3rd parties. One example is my sqlite3-ada:
http://hg.stronglytyped.org/sqlite3-ada

It works with Janus/Ada and GNAT. (Probably also with Irvine, not
sure since I haven't tested.)

There are also other sqlite3-ada bindings (with same name!) around, 
but those are usually meant only for GNAT.

-- 
Tero Koskinen - http://iki.fi/tero.koskinen/