Re: Is the Ada World Embarrassed by the Defense Industry?

["E. Robert Tisdale" <edwin@netwood.net>]

Tucker Taft wrote:

> Ken Garlington wrote:
>
> > Actually, as the person who started this thread,
> > I was talking about marketing.
> > It just seems odd to make choices
> > that damage your historical customer base (military)
> > before you've adequately captured your new base (non-military).
>
> I think we are interested in appealing to military customers.
> If you have recommendations of the best way to do so, please fire away.
> I honestly had the sense that broadcasting military success stories
> was actually counterproductive in some circles,
> including some military circles.

I'm not sure what choices Ken Garlington is talking about.

I'm not sure that it is counterproductive
to "broadcast" military success stories.
But I do have a very strong impression
that the military is far more interested in commercial successes
that can be used in military applications.

I worked on
the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL)
Application Programmer's Interface (API) standard

    http://www.vsipl.org/

for a while.
Originally, I expected that there would be a great deal of interest
in an Ada language binding for the VSIPL API standard
but almost no one -- including the participants
from DARPA and the U.S. Navy -- was interested.
They weren't (and still aren't) even particularly concerned
about a C++ language binding for the VSIPL API standard.
The ANSI C language binding is the only one
which has been specified so far.
The reason is that, until recently, only ANSI C compilers
were available for embedded Digital Signal Processing chips
which are likely targets for a standard VSIPL implementation.
There are now very good C++ compilers for high end DSP chips
so I expect that the VSIPL Forum will, eventually, specify
a C++ language binding for the VSIPL API standard.
There are still almost no really good Ada compilers
for any embedded DSP chips
so I don't expect movement on an Ada language binding
for the VSIPL API standard any time in the near future.