Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

["Juha Valimaki" <juha.valimaki@xdsloy.com>]

"Robert Dewar" <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:5ee5b646.0208211132.6c283ef0@posting.google.com...
> Indeed we are not trying to "penetrate the mass market". That's not our
> business area. Our expertise is in providing high level support from high
> level competent engineers. We don't see that as scaling to a mass market.
>
> The world seems full of people who are happy to spend lots
> of energy in trying to get Ada Core to move in that direction, but sadly
> none of these people seem willing to spend their own energy persuing a
> market that they are sure we are missing!
>

> Robert Dewar
> Ada Core Techonologies

Robert, I think you could say I am one person trying to push Ada to mass
market. I understand it's nobody's business to say what ACT should do, but I
also hope you see why people are asking ACT to do something: GNAT simply
seems so close to "perfect" product for many tasks, if just there was
business interest. I think many people feel GNAT is property of ACT (no
matter what the copyright says). People simply expect ACT to do something
(It's not any fault of ACT, but just the way things are). Nothing may happen
until ACT does something and same time the free version version makes it
harder for other companies to target the low-end market. For not-so-realtime
and not-so-high-reliability applications Ada sure has advantages over
C++/Java, but the advantage is not large enough to pay for expensive
tools/support.

I still haven't decided if Ada really is worth all the effort... I mean, Ada
sure has nice qualities and I am sure choosing Ada would make me more
productive, but the tool/support costs are so high I really have to
calculate if I will gain something. (Money, time and productivity are of
course related here: with money I can buy productivity and to get money I
have to work to get income and so productivity will decrease.)

The situation would be very different if there was  "GNAT like" tool
available for, lets say, 2000 USD or less for each major platform. No
project/Ada support, just binaries, manuals and bug fixes. That would be an
easy choice! Even better if the company developing that tool said they are
actually interested in supporting "mass market" use of Ada... (To actually
get the "mass market" there would have to be IMO more visibility for cool
Ada projects and maybe 1000 USD price tag (?))

Juha

P.S. On March 2002 Alias|Wavefront lowered the price of their Maya animation
tool for $7500 to $1999, effectively transforming their company from premium
high-end to mass market. I am not suggesting Ada companies should do the
same and I not even sure if the move was good, but it shows the world is
changing.

P.S.II. Games are these days quite heavy in (soft) real time activities and
multitasking. I personally think Ada would be very well suited for games...
if just someone had the muscle to create/sell interesting tools for game
programmers!