Re: Ada Operating System

["Ian S. Nelson" <nelsonis@earthlink.net>]

Wes Groleau wrote:
> A pessimist's viewpoint:
> 
> To make an operating system successful, you need
> at least one of
> 
>  - sufficient quantity of useful applications


Needless to say.  That doesn't make it a worthless project though.
Research and demostrations are powerful.

>  - sufficient geek appeal to attract developers.

I think this clearly exists.  Linux and BSD examples and if you do some 
digging, there are probably 50 to 100 other "free OS" projects being 
done be individuals all over the world.  People are interested in system 
level stuff.


>  - sufficent robustness/power/features to overcome
>    the lack of either of the others.
> 
> To get people to write applications that run on it,
> it must have enough users to make people want to
> write apps for it.  So you have a chicken/egg problem
> for the first point.
> 
> For the second, you have the prevailing distaste for
> Ada against you ("Us" if you will).


I'll go on a limb.  I don't think people hate ada.  People dislike 
change to some degree, they dislike hype and they dislike uphill 
battles.  Outside of a few geekier circles I've never heard anything bad 
about ada other than "The DoD uses it" which isn't really a positive or 
negative statement about Ada.


> On the robustness/power/features point, obviously
> Ada has a significant advantage over C/C++/Java.

Not really.  I think that remains to be seen.  Linux doesn't crash a 
lot.  It's not "weapons grade" but we're not talking about that. Code 
written in Ada isn't going to be better than code in C, C++ or Java by 
default, which is suggested so many times.   It should be cheaper to 
write it in Ada at the same level. Right now, the benchmark is high, BSD 
and Linux have solid reputations for being rock solid, and for 99% of 
the tasks done on computers they are.    Implementing a BSD clone in Ada 
would be fun but you couldn't sell it by saying that it is "more stable" 
becuase you could never show that, at least not in an interesting way.


> BUT, when you multiply the language potential
> by the number of developers, Linux still comes
> out ahead.  In spite of its implementation language,
> Linux is quite robust, and it has hundreds of
> developers for every AdaOS developer to keep it
> that way.  Shift the target to features, and
> Microsoft will always have you beat there.
> They will always sacrifice security/robustness
> to beat any competition in features.  And their
> "if you can't beat 'em, steal 'em" technique
> also applies.
> 
> So on the third point, you have say a hundred
> developers and a language that scores ten on
> some arbitrary rating scale vs. several thousand
> developers and a language that scores one or two.
> 
> Do the math and Ada loses.  Unfortunately.


Well what is the goal?  If you're expecting to develop a kernel or full 
on OS and have it sweep the world by storm, that's probably not going to 
happen.  I've been involved in that industry, I've seen how it works and 
you're right, Ada would lose because there are so many other factors 
that are so much bigger than implementation language.  I think that 
there isn't a killer app any more that you could develop and sell ada to 
the world with.

Now if you're trying to build Ada community and show people that good 
things can be done with Ada, out in the public and not in secure 
environments, then I think that doing any projects in Ada is a good 
thing.  Building a kernel in Ada could be a very fun project, I'll tell 
you right now that it's not likely going to displace Linux, BSD or any 
other big kernel but it could be a fun project none the less and get 
people interested.    Kernels in particular seem to be an area where 
lot's of people like to tinker and play right now,  a kernel in Ada 
could be readable enough and clean enough to allow non-system hackers to 
  play around with.

Ian Nelson