Re: Advice on best environment for Ada on Windows

[Jere <jhb.chat@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, February 13, 2020 at 12:13:16 AM UTC-5, Rick Newbie wrote:
> I'm new to Ada and slowly getting into my first small programs. The 
> question that arises soon after the first steps is that of the best 
> working environment, so I wanted to hear what the regular Ada users work 
> with.
> 
> <SNIPPED>
> 
> So what does everyone else use? What is the best solution here?
> 
> Thanks

I use either GPS or VS Code.  Up until the 2019 Community version, 
GPS has been really buggy on Windows 10 (especially 2017 and 2018 
versions).  It's definitely not the installation as I can take the 
same file on multiple different Windows 10 machines and install it 
exactly the same way and at the exact same location and it will 
work pretty well on one machine but have random issues on other 
machines.  Reinstallation doesn't change it.  Redownloading the 
file and reinstalling with that doesn't either.  That said, so far 
2019 has been very stable for me on all machines, so I am hoping 
that continues.  I could never get 2017 or 2018 to install correctly 
on my Ubuntu machine (though I haven't gone back to try 2019 on 
Ubuntu yet).  My guess is that it has some undocumented / unknown 
dependencies that don't affect most people.

GPS has good autocomplete/intellisense functionality that it 
provides and I like the auto formatting functionality (including 
being able to highlight a lot of Ada code and hit tab to reformat 
the code after a long string of programming changes).

For vscode, I would recommend the syntax highlighting extension 
by Entomy:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Entomy

It has pretty good functionality and the author has been pretty 
responsive.  Lucretia also has a good one, but you can't get it 
from the marketplace, so use the link they provided earlier.  
Adacore is working on an extension as well (which is available 
on the marketplace), but it is still pretty young so they are 
working out some kinks.  They are integrating the extension with 
the language server protocol (LSP) which can be used to provide 
a better autocomplete/intellisense functionality.