Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

 (Dan McLeran) writes:
> If you read my post again, you'll see that I am contrasting GPS to
> .Net, Eclipse, and Borland tools. The point I am trying to make is
> that ACT is charging a fortune for a toolset that falls far short of
> what other vendors are charging.

Ada Core is not charging for the toolset; they are charging for the
support.  You don't have to pay a dime to Ada Core if you don't want
to.  The license cost for GPS (or for the entire toolchain for that
matter) is zero.  If you feel you don't need support, or if you are
willing to do your own support, you can use GPS at no cost.

Also, if you work for a university and use GPS to teach or do
research, Ada Core will support you at no cost.

If you use Debian as your development platform, you will get a minimal
amount of support, for free, from yours truly.

> IMO, the GPS and GtkAda tools are not in the same league as .Net,
> Eclipse, JBuilder, others.

Indeed, they are not in the same league.  Ada Core's customers use the
toolset for safety-critical, mission-critical, multi-year,
multi-developer, multi-million-dollar, multi-million-lines-of-code
projects.  If your project is large enough, and if the stakes are high
enough, you don't mind paying $15k/year to Ada Core (just to put
things into perspective, your 5 supported software engineers will cost
you roughly $500k/year).

By contrast, .Net, Eclipse, JBuilder are mass-marketed to an audience
of "coders", not "software engineers", to paraphrase Jeffrey Carter.
I would also be curious what prices Microsoft, IBM and Borland charge
for support contracts (as opposed to licenses) for .Net, Eclipse and
JBuilder respectively.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.