Re: is ada dead?

[Emmanuel Briot <briot@gnat.com>]

Vinzent Hoefler <vinzent@MailAndNews.com> writes:
> The other is to start developing lots of "cool" stuff with it. *That*, I
> think >we can do. Right now the best example of this that I know of is GVD
> >(http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ), but perhaps I'm a werido for thinking
> >debuggers are cool. :-)
>
> Hey, this one _is_ cool.
>
> But, hmm, quite long buglist for an Ada project *ouch* *NO, NO, NO, please
> don't beat me, it's just the big font!*


Not beating you on the head, but:

There are actually several things worth nothing with regards to gvd:

- thanks to Ada, the development was very fast (we started coding at the
  beginning of May 2000, and had a first public release around november I
  think, with a very usable version already.

- The list of "bugs" is in fact not that long. If you look into the file we
  have put in the distribution, it is more of a list of things to do or that
  would be nice to have, ie a list of possible enhancements. There are some
  bugs, admittedly (and we fix some every week, especially related to
  cross-platform development :-().

- Another big win of Ada is the portability: porting from our linux machines to
  a windows host was mostly the matter of rewritting the low-level communication  package (through pipes and ttys). And this package has now been integrated in
  GNAT itself, so the portability would be even easier now :-)
  I do not know of many C projects that are as easy to port...

- GVD might be one of the first free-software Ada project (along with
  Seti@home) that doesn't only target the Ada world.


Now, something not related to you.  I see lots of people suggesting that we
should have lots of Ada applications around to prove that Ada is not
dead. However, as the co-author of several big packages that were released as
open-source projects (GtkAda, GVD, XML/Ada, ada-mode for Emacs), I am sorry to
say that we do not get a lot of patches (certainly less that equivalent C
projects do).  We do fully appreciate the bug reports, and the few suggestions
for enhancements, but that doesn't increase the time we have to develop the
projects!

I don't know if this is related to the size of the Ada community, or simply a
lack of a free-software culture in this Ada world, but it would certainly seem
like the first nice step forward (contributing to existing Ada projects).
There is also AWS, OpenToken, AdaOS,... so there's probably already something
you might be interested in and where your knowledge would be much appreciated.
It would be interesting to know from the authors of the other packages whether
they get patches or not.

Emmanuel