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

[KK6GM <mjsilva@scriptoriumdesigns.com>]

On Mar 13, 8:17 pm, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Le Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:20:00 +0100, KK6GM <mjsi...@scriptoriumdesigns.com>  
> a écrit:
>
> A question aside: what is the typical real-life usage of these kind of  
> board ? And what is the typical kind of application to be run on these  
> board ? (I do not know anything about embedded systems, I just know  
> desktop and server computers).

Wow, that's a big question.  Just imagine all the processors in a
modern car.  For that matter, imagine all the processors in a modern
aircraft.  Motor control is a big area, for example.  Appliances of
all varieties.  All types of applications that read sensors, drive
outputs of various kinds, have comms with other parts of the system,
and perhaps have a user interface.  These applications can greatly
benefit from Ada's concurrency and realtime features (and often, fixed-
point as well).  That is, of course, in addition to all the other
benefits of Ada.  There are billions of microcontrollers shipped each
year that are not running Windows or Linux, but rather are running a
smaller, tighter RTOS or are not running any RTOS at all.  Ada is an
excellent fit for all but the low end of this market - certainly as
good a fit as C++.

IMO, if an embedded engineer can try out Ada's tasking and realtime
features on a typical piece of hardware, they'll be sold.  But there
seems to be no easy way to make that happen, and it needs to be easy
or they won't bother.