Re: Point a beginner in the right direction? Cheap bare-board to run with a RTOS for running ADA

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<mjsilva@scriptoriumdesigns.com> wrote in message 
news:81c8e4a2-f0bb-4559-b2b7-0eba08ddca99@googlegroups.com...
On Tuesday, July 9, 2013 12:51:39 AM UTC-7, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
...
> No technology ever dies, it becomes niche. Ada's advantage in the niche is
>
> minimal. Its advantage on mainstream SBCs is potentially huge.

>But the difference is that nobody is arguing that Ada is not suitable for 
>SBCs.  However,
> you are dismissing Ada on microcontrollers, of which tens of billions are 
> sold each year
> (big niche!).  You are making this an either/or question, which it most 
> certainly is not.  How
> is it that you have been appointed to determine where Ada can be 
> beneficial, and where
> it cannot?

He hasn't, he's just telling the truth. On tiny systems, 90% of Ada's 
advantages are negated; you're talking about systems with no exceptions, 
extremely limited tasking (Ravenscar is far too limited to be usable outside 
of the hands of experts with lots of time to spend on analysis), very 
limited numerics (usually integers only), and that by their very nature have 
to be small (so the benefit of Ada's program structuring features like 
private types and child packages are hardly noticable, except in a negative 
way as they often will slightly increase code size).

Such a language is completely different than the Ada I know, and it's 
dubious to call it Ada at all. Moreover, the advantages it still has are 
impossible to explain to someone that is using some other high-level 
language -- most of the code written would end up as C-in-Ada-syntax and the 
programmers would never find out why that is bad (because it wouldn't matter 
on those systems).

The truth is, you don't *need* Ada to program such systems, and on such 
systems it's "just another programming language", especially from the 
perspective of the average programmer (as opposed to the Ada true believer). 
It wouldn't cause the sort of correctness improvements that you see when 
using Ada on larger systems, so it hard to see why people would pay extra 
for it. And if no one wants to pay for it, it isn't going to exist (almost 
all great Open Source software has its roots in for-pay companys).

                                            Randy.