Re: Carbon

["A.J." <ianozia@gmail.com>]

On Saturday, August 6, 2022 at 10:18:17 AM UTC-4, dennis knorr wrote:
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I agree with you on some of these points.  Ada never seemed to be big on marketing, at least outside of specific niches, and from a learning & resources aspect, it took me reading Barnes' Programming in Ada 2012 cover-to-cover to properly grok the language.  With that being said, things have been changing a lot in the last two years.

https://learn.adacore.com is a decent resource in that it gives you little ada interpreter with code snippets you can test out yourself right in the browser.  It's not exactly a "web playground or repl shell" but it's pretty good and seems to support the standard library.

From a library and tooling standpoint, I would check out Alire.  It takes a matter of minutes to get from not having any ada compilers installed at all to compiling your own hello example and there's a lot of libraries already supported ( https://alire.ada.dev/crates.html ).  To bring, for example, Gnatcoll_sqlite, into your project, you would simply just type "alr with gnatcoll_sqlite" while in that directory.

Here's a quick start that I wrote up for my friends:
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1: Download alire for your OS (e.g. on Windows it's "alr-*-installer-x86_64-windows.exe"): https://github.com/alire-project/alire/releases
2: After installing, run the "Alire" program
3: Once you're in the Alire command prompt, type alr and then hit "enter", and it'll install everything you need (e.g. on Windows, it'll install msys2)
4: To grab an example project that you can install and run, type "alr get hello", and it'll automatically fetch the "hello world" package.
5: Go to that newly added project's folder with command "cd hello" and enter.
6: Build and run the project by typing "alr run"
7: Alire will automatically download and install the ada compiler and everything.  You'll get a prompt asking what toolchains to use, just hit the enter key twice to select the defaults.
To create anything new in Alire, just type "alr init --bin myproj" and it'll create a new project that you can start programming in a project named  "myproj". (if it asks for your github info, you can just leave it blank).
More info here https://alire.ada.dev/docs/#first-steps
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Then of course there's the awesome-ada repository that has some nice resources, albeit they seem to mostly be in English: https://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada