Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@no.spam.com>]

Markus E Leypold wrote:

>> both languages are easily "bindable". You can even have C API for Ada
>> implementation - pragma Export is just as useful as pragma Import!.
>> In other words, you don't need to use C for implementation part even
>> if you want to have C API for reasons of useability. This is exacly
>> what the open-source guys don't seem to get right.
> 
> So Ada = Closed Source = Good and C = Open Source = Bad or something
> like this? I don't understand it.

Of course not. There is a significant amount of extremely good open 
source software around, and I also suppose that some crappy Ada code 
exists as well (it's harder to find it, but for the sake of argument I 
can write some ;-) ).
My point is that the majority of open source world seems to get stuck 
with C as a main development language for reasons which I don't really 
understand. I understand the use of C on the interface level (everything 
can bind to C, so it's the "least common denominator" for interfacing), 
but internally many projects would greatly benefit from using just about 
anything else. Developers reject this idea on the grounds that C is 
*the* progamming language for open source, end of story. I think that 
GNU luminaries (Stallman in particular) add to this mindset by 
publishing web pages promoting C as the language of choice and the crowd 
follows.

> Apart from that, me seems it would be a bit difficult to have a C API
> to some Ada library, since Ada requires quite a lot of runtime support
> for tasking, so certainly doesn't interact to well C-code which also
> use signals, longjmp etc.

Your argument can be applied in the other direction as well. How about 
binding Ada to C libraries that use non-Ada runtime internally? It's 
enough if the C library uses POSIX threads and its interaction with 
tasking in Ada is already outside of what AARM specifies.
Binding (in any direction) requires some assuptions about the two 
environments. There is way to escape them.


-- 
Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/
Programming    : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/