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: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,UTF8 Path: g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.scarlet.biz!news.scarlet.biz.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:12:58 -0600 From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <20070123211651.c0d43695.tero.koskinen@iki.fi> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:12:56 +0100 Message-ID: <87zm89tpk7.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:zn4VvVeOYNVw8KZPboQTGHxyVd4= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.235.225.171 X-Trace: sv3-a0sK6zI5ofahhILLnZ/HT6/wZk103zQoa0SLPNoKrUkq1uOuXQ8BAZmmlIdiGvp1VoGeIs8i/2urfr7!TOj8jvCaoEaxeItLAz8JvtvbXAPYM3cO0lNH8igWuo+FY0Fd4BtyyAjRtEP4BQOixW4xoxibEKs= X-Complaints-To: abuse@scarlet.be X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@scarlet.biz X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.32 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8445 Date: 2007-01-23T22:12:56+01:00 List-Id: Tero Koskinen writes: > Ada part of GCC supports far less platforms than C and C++ parts. Actually, I don't think that that's a result of Ada not being a release-critical language for GCC. I rather think that that's a result of too few people contributing to the Ada part of GCC, which is itself a result of too few people using Ada. Chicken and egg, catch-22. But that also applies to other software; for example OpenBSD's ports collection is much smaller than Debian's or FreeBSD's; why is that? As a counter-example, Aurélien Jarno single-handedly ported GNAT to GNU/kFreeBSD, which is hardly a mainstream platform. His patches, initially available for several versions of GNAT, are now in the Debian packages; you can review them if you like to get a feeling of how hard it would be to support, say, OpenBSD. I believe that it was Samuel Tardieu who contributed the sparc-linux port back in the 3.13p or 3.14p days, but I may be wrong on this. > So, lets imagine that you are a lead developer in an open source > project (***). One of your goals is to produce software, which will > run atleast on following systems: > * Debian GNU/Linux 3.1: i386, IA-64, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS > * OpenSUSE 10.2: i386, x86-64 > * OpenBSD 4.0: i386, AMD64, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC > * FreeBSD 6.2: i386, AMD64, Alpha > > The question is: Which programming language do you choose? > (***) Like KDE, Subversion, GTK+, or Sendmail If your project consists of general-purpose libraries and you want them available to as many developers as possible, then your best choice is C; not only because of compiler availability because, more importantly, because C makes it easy to call your libraries from other languages. It is a design goal of GNOME, for example, to support many languages for application development, and that's why the GTK+ and GNOME libraries are implemented in C, despite the fact that they are object-oriented and so would have benefited from an object-oriented language. -- Ludovic Brenta.