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 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!news-in.ntli.net!newsrout1-win.ntli.net!ntli.net!news.highwinds-media.com!newspeer1-win.ntli.net!newsfe2-gui.ntli.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: "Dr. Adrian Wrigley" Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity.) Message-ID: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <51m6rqF1kqpr0U1@mid.individual.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:56:56 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.21.99.109 X-Trace: newsfe2-gui.ntli.net 1169589416 82.21.99.109 (Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:56:56 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:56:56 GMT Organization: NTL Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8448 Date: 2007-01-23T21:56:56+00:00 List-Id: On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 11:38:28 +0100, Alex R. Mosteo wrote: > artifact.one@googlemail.com wrote: > >> Hello. >> >> I am a long time C programmer (10 years plus), having a look >> at Ada for the first time. From my (inadequate) testing, it seems >> that performance of average Ada code is on par with average >> C code, and there's a clear advantage in runtime safety. The >> GNU ada compiler makes pretty sure that there are very few >> platforms without easy access to Ada, so portability should be >> on at least an equal footing too. >> >> My question is: how come Ada isn't more popular? > > Others have given longer scoped responses, and I will concentrate on the > hobbyist POV (I have felt an Ada hobbyist for a long time now): there is a > catch-22 problem with Ada and it is the lack of libraries. This is a > relative problem, consider these points. > > 1) The standard library is really standard, so this is an advantage if it > does all you need. Also some features (e.g. fixed point, bound checking, > tasking!) are in the language so you don't need extra wrappers around the > basic language or OS. > > 2) There's no good, easy, almost automatic C binding generator, although the > language has well defined mechanisms for C interfacing. Yes, there was some > generator. No, it is not trivial at present to get it running in my > experience. There's some effort to have Ada integrated into SWIG; this is > promising and IMHO an important selling point to newcomers. I think this is critical. Why can't we just say: with stdio; pragma import (C, stdio, "stdio.h"); and be able to get structs, functions, constants, variables from C in an obvious and reasonably reliable way? Much of what is in C has direct analogs in Ada. Some of it is via fiddly #defines, but even a useful subset of these would be e And of course compilers should spit out header files on request matching an ada package via the "obvious" rules, so you can #include it from C. -- Adrian