Re: Heartbleed

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> That's because an Ada compiler is far more complex to design. This may
> be another rational for a standard Ada minimal *frozen* *subset* (not
> a new language) without every thing which is finally a derived form of
> the most fundamental constructs with additional limitations.


This rational could have been valid 20 years or 30 years ago, when
proprietary software was more common, and free software was less
numerous and of more difficult access.  Also, at a time, when a full Ada
compiler would take 90% of the usual computer RAM, and 12 floppies.  At
the same time, the first C compiler for Macintosh took only 2 floppies.
And 30 years ago there were tens of different processors, and hundreds
of different OSes, which made it very difficult to provide a compiler
running everywhere.



BUT  not anymore.

Nowadays, you type apt-get install gcc or apt-get install gnat and the
compiler is fetched from the Internet, and it doesn't make a difference
if it takes 8 MB or 80 MB. 

Nowadays, there are only two processors: Intel on desktop and ARM on
mobile, and there remains only ONE system: Unix (Linux on desktop Linux
and Android, Darwin (BSD) on desktop MacOSX and iOS).  

And user machines have gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of hard disk, more
than enough for any compiler and run-time.



Therefore not only is access to free(dom) software easier, but you
usually don't even have to port it to your system, since it already
targets it.


There should be no difficulty anymore to spread Ada or any other good
language or software.

What is needed for that however is a end-user "killer" application, an
application that users want to install on their system and that will
bring as dependency the language run-time it's written with onto all the
systems.  And if this application is not perfect, but good enough to
motivate users to improve it, it's even better, since they they'll
install the compiler to be able to patch it.


For example, this is I got Haskell installed on my systems, for programs
such as darcs or pandoc.

( Of course, the reverse is also true: I try to avoid installing
applications written in languages I don't want to install on my system
:-/ )


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/
"Le mercure monte ?  C'est le moment d'acheter !"