Re: What's stopping you from using Ada for your next commercial project?

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

Florian Weimer writes:
> * Ludovic Brenta:
>
>> Things are not as bleak as Maciej makes them seem; by his own
>> admission, most of the bugs he encountered were with interfaces.  The
>> system I work on consists of 1.5 million lines of Ada and has been in
>> existence for almost 20 years.  I would not say we spend 50% of our
>> time reporting and working around compiler bugs; the real figure is
>> probably 1% for us, below noise level.  That's probably because we
>> don't use interfaces :)
>
> If you're in the industry and have received professional training,
> you're following the beaten path, sticking to what is known to work.

I learned Ada by myself in 2003 and then worked in avionics (no tagged
types, let alone interfaces) and then on a long-term-support application
that started in Ada 83 and now uses only a few Ada 2005 features like
the extended return statement for build-in-place limited types.

> (Nothing wrong with that, up to a degree.)  I have never received any
> formal Ada training, and I share Maciej's experience to some extent.

I think I know something about GNAT bugs :) The bugs that I have found
have never been blocking for me; a workaround was almost always very
easy to find.  (I still duly reported all bugs I found to AdaCore, of
course).  As a consequence, the time I spend fighting, or even
reporting, compiler bugs is negligible.  I just wanted to give another
data point to show that mileage does vary widely.

[...]
> With other languages, I tend to keep tinkering until things work in
> some way.

I work with Makefiles, C and Korn Shell scripts a lot.  Makefiles are
too cryptic for me to even try to figure out whether I can suspect a bug
in GNU make, so when writing Makefiles I do tinker until they work.  C
is too simple for compilers to still have bugs, nowadays (except for
back-end bugs like code generation, but I only use mainstream targets
where such bugs are unlikely).  OTOH, at work we've discovered a pair of
mysterious bugs in zsh that even our professional mission-critical
support still has not fixed after a couple of years (yes, they're that
bizarre).  In fact, as the saying goes, the only tool where we (at
Eurocontrol) have never found a bug is "cat" :)

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.