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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Weakness of Ada is expensive / security / etc. ? Anything else?
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 13:20:56 -0700
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Date: 2015-07-20T13:20:56-07:00
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Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>> The number I heard was at least 10x higher than single-seat licenses of
>> competing C/C++ and Forth products that I know of.
> But these products have unbundled support, and you pay only for
> software licenses, right?  So the comparison isn't really fair.

The other products do have good support, though I don't know how to
compare it with Adacore support, which sounds very high end.

> For GNAT, the equivalent self-support option is priced at a very
> competitive $0.

No I don't think so, there's a lot of software not included with the
free system, there's lots of unsupported processors that the commercial
package supports, and there is also the GPL runtime issue.  I'm fine
with the idea that someone wanting to ship a non-free product shouldn't
whine about having to use non-free tools, but once you've made the step
into proprietary toolchains, it's ok to be cost conscious when comparing
them.

>> it seems to leave an unfilled need for the low-budget embedded
>> developer who wants a better language than C.
>
> I doubt it's commercially reasonable to support such developers, at
> least not without constraining them to a specific (small set) of
> target platforms.

Sure, I wouldn't expect support for every weird processor out there, but
there are many non-Ada compiler vendors who support a reasonable target
range affordably to small developers.  There doesn't seem to be anything
comparable for Ada.