From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.scarlet.biz!news.scarlet.biz.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:52:15 -0600 From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <20070123211651.c0d43695.tero.koskinen@iki.fi> <87zm89tpk7.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <4q4pqgmdwo.fsf@hod.lan.m-e-leypold.de> Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:52:14 +0100 Message-ID: <873b5yjhkx.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:cYlMQlsgeZh5srpesGRylZpC+c8= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.235.203.8 X-Trace: sv3-1zqNad/Y5rYTmdGGuDXJmFE9usYeyELxwMsTCVGK44NmtISLiaYWgbNYOEcTQQjzpgwl94X5jIdbbvz!fToY9XIR0r1b8hr9coXCcVdOAhAqZkxNlch2rwXmba2XFhFbtzrVP9Wd5RDyPWvOYAdKEB6x X-Complaints-To: abuse@scarlet.be X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@scarlet.biz X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.32 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8591 Date: 2007-01-26T09:52:14+01:00 List-Id: Markus E Leypold writes: > Apropos Python: There are a lot of languages that are rather popular > in OSS development apart from C. KDE is bound to Qt so cannot leave > C. C++, actually. And there are bindings in Python and a few other languages. Yves Bailly is even busy writing an Ada binding for Qt, using an intermediate C binding. GNOME has more language bindings because it is written directly in C. > GNOME AFAI understand will slowly shift to Mono as application run > time and thus will have more and mor C# code (that also shows what the > OSS guys percieve as their main problem: Pointers and memory > management, both of which have not been really solved in Ada to an > extent desirable for application programming (as opposed to > embedded)). There seems to be disagreements between the GNOME developers. Some promote the shift towards C#, but others would rather stay with C in order to avoid the need for the large C# library and interpreter infrastructure. >>> Apart from that, me seems it would be a bit difficult to have a C API >>> to some Ada library, since Ada requires quite a lot of runtime support >>> for tasking, so certainly doesn't interact to well C-code which also >>> use signals, longjmp etc. >> >> Your argument can be applied in the other direction as well. How about >> binding Ada to C libraries that use non-Ada runtime internally? It's > > Yes, this is a problem. Therefore the usual approach is, to avoid this > or at least to make the runtime separable and exchangeable. The usual approach is to either stick to C (see e.g. Evolution), or accept the overhead of another language's runtime because the cost is spread over a large code base (see the new GNOME applications written in C#). As I said, both approaches have their proponents within the GNOME community. The run-time is always separate (i.e. in shared libraries), but not necessarily exchangeable, and exchangeability is not a design goal. -- Ludovic Brenta.