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,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,b99897135d6631cc X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews2.google.com!not-for-mail From: 18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: memory management and productivity Date: 26 Jun 2004 13:38:33 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 63.194.87.148 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1088282314 28112 127.0.0.1 (26 Jun 2004 20:38:34 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 20:38:34 +0000 (UTC) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1937 Date: 2004-06-26T13:38:33-07:00 List-Id: "Ed Falis" wrote in message news:... > On 25 Jun 2004 16:35:53 -0700, Russ <18k11tm001@sneakemail.com> wrote: > > > Yup. Look at the amazing popularity of Java. I would venture to say > > that it is due, in large part, to Java's garbage collection. > > > Unfortunately, there are counter-arguments to this conjecture, anyway. > > Consider Eiffel, a very nice language, quite Ada-like in many ways, with > garbage collection and several innovative features (eg design by > contract). It is not as popular or as widely used as Ada. > > Consider that both Aonix (from Intermetrics/Averstar) and AdaCore provided > Ada compilers for the JVM, including garbage collection and robust > bindings to the Java class libraries. Neither was commercially > successful. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that open-source developers now expect their compiler to be free -- as in beer. So do students. That is a real dilemma for compiler vendors, of course, and I don't envy them. But now that the Ada->JVM compilers have been determined to be commercially unviable, is it conceivable that they could be open-sourced and made available for free -- as in beer *and* speech? Why waste all the effort that went into them? Perhaps a free Ada->JVM compiler with robust bindings to the Java class libraries might be a key to a revival of Ada. Then again, maybe not. But if not, the prospects for a revival of Ada seem rather bleak.