Re: Ada Operating System

["Dann Corbit" <dcorbit@connx.com>]

"Wes Groleau" <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:3C88E0D1.89161C16@despammed.com...
>
> A pessimist's viewpoint:
>
> To make an operating system successful, you need
> at least one of
>
>  - sufficient quantity of useful applications
>
>  - sufficient geek appeal to attract developers.
>
>  - sufficent robustness/power/features to overcome
>    the lack of either of the others.
>
> To get people to write applications that run on it,
> it must have enough users to make people want to
> write apps for it.  So you have a chicken/egg problem
> for the first point.
>
> For the second, you have the prevailing distaste for
> Ada against you ("Us" if you will).
>
> On the robustness/power/features point, obviously
> Ada has a significant advantage over C/C++/Java.
>
> BUT, when you multiply the language potential
> by the number of developers, Linux still comes
> out ahead.  In spite of its implementation language,
> Linux is quite robust, and it has hundreds of
> developers for every AdaOS developer to keep it
> that way.  Shift the target to features, and
> Microsoft will always have you beat there.
> They will always sacrifice security/robustness
> to beat any competition in features.  And their
> "if you can't beat 'em, steal 'em" technique
> also applies.
>
> So on the third point, you have say a hundred
> developers and a language that scores ten on
> some arbitrary rating scale vs. several thousand
> developers and a language that scores one or two.
>
> Do the math and Ada loses.  Unfortunately.


There are billions of dollars lost per month due to virus attacks.  Most of
them are buffer overruns.  A secure OS ought to be interesting to someone.
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