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: 103376,677963b1aa23e668 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.glorb.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: What's stopping you from using Ada for your next commercial project? Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:10:04 +0100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: <87aagxv26r.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> References: <4d78867e$0$23760$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> <87r5afv0qa.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <871v29zfd8.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="yM4XO8RITwvY98kIs17zIQ"; logging-data="19621"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX199t4rU91uiLWR9nyvPI4SL" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.2 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:6encyyur6B8XzgoF1Q+yOzC2eic= sha1:0Lan0IOph8aIqHrDBuyhy/VjDUk= Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:18194 Date: 2011-03-14T22:10:04+01:00 List-Id: 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.