Practicalities of Ada for app development

[wrp <i3text@gmail.com>]

What would you say about using Ada for developing desktop
applications? I like what I have read in descriptions of the language,
but I have concerns about the practicality of using it.

I develop small to medium sized tools. Tasks are mostly limited to
text processing, database management, and simple visualization. I have
no need for high precision calculation or support for distributed,
concurrent, or real-time control. You can picture for example the size
and scope of the traditional Unix utilities. Sometimes I build
something larger with a GUI.

For considerations of size and performance, I'm planning to shift from
scripting to a compiled language. I develop on Linux but also target
Windows and OS X. After trying to consider everything available, I
feel that the only serious cadidates for me are C and Ada.

1. To begin with, I've heard it said that Ada, designed for embedded
system building, is simply not suited to apps for a general computing
platform. That's rather vague and I haven't seen any detailed
justification of that claim. What would you say?

2. I don't need tools to be free, but they have to be affordable to a
small shop. If I'm targeting x86-64 (and possibly ARM) is GNAT the
only compiler option I have?

3. How about the quality and availablity of supporting tools like
debuggers and profilers?

4. How about production quality, open source libraries for things like
Unicode support, sockets, network communication, GUIs, etc? The stuff
at www.dmitry-kazakov.de looks good, but most of what I have seen
online is from the 1980s and pretty rough to begin with.

5. How well is incremental development supported? I'm thinking of
things like modular compiling and speed of the edit-compile-test
cycle.

6. Size and latency are sometimes an issue. I've heard that since GNAT
is oriented to building larger systems, the executables it produces
are comparatively bulky. What is the situation relative to C in that
regard?

7. What advanced tutorial material is there for using Ada in this way?
Say that I have Norman Cohen's _Ada as a Second Language_. What more
advanced material is available on subjects other than concurrency,
distributed processing, or real-time systems? On a related note, what
projects would you recommend looking at as examples of great code?

Thanks