Re: Improving Ada's image - Was: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

An OS targeted to some under-served segment of the market might make 
some sense. I've suggested that a Windows-ish thing that could run one 
or more processes in "Realtime" mode might find some use. Also, the OS's 
I've seen for Digital TV Settop Boxes were mostly pretty weak and its an 
emerging market that doesn't yet have an all-dominating standard. There 
might be other possibilities as well - such as an OS that caters to 
large numbers of multiprocessors, or an OS designed to take advantage of 
emerging technological possibilities with large non-volatile memories, 
or an OS aiming to take advantage of the merging of telecommunication 
technologies (you're home computer being your telephone and your tv set 
and maybe a few other things as well?) Find a way of saying that an Ada 
OS offers some functionality you don't already have available with 
Windows or Linux or MacOS (or whatever) and you have some possible 
direction to go down to justify why an Ada OS might work.

If someone is serious about making an Ada OS then I'd suggest finding 
one of these under-served segments, getting creative in how to address 
it and start working on something minimal enough to get out there and be 
usable in some regard. From a working prototype it might be possible to 
build a business - or a whole industry. But it won't happen by simply 
trying to supplant Windows and doing it as a hobby.

MDC


Richard Riehle wrote:
> 
> There is no reason why someone could not write an OS in Ada. There
> is some reason to wonder whether this would be a good use of
> programmer resources given the current state of the market for
> Operating Systems.   C and C++ can be, and have been, used with
> comparitively good success in writing Operating Systems.  Expert
> programmers can do good work in nearly any language, even Ada,
> Eiffel, D, Forth, Pascal, Assembler, or [your favorite goes here].


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