Re: Suitability for small Windows projects

[haering@sunhalle3.informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Gerhard Haering)]

In article <8qr809$cjj@newshost.fujitsu.com.au>, Ray Smith wrote:
>Hi There,
>
>I have been looking into Ada for hobby programming.
>(I am a professional Cobol / Visual Basic programmer with small amounts of
>experience in about a dozen of other languages)
>
>I have read the FAQ, browsed www.adahome.com but still had a couple of
>questions I hope someone can answer.
>
>1.  Can Ada (Assume gnat) produce standalone Windows executables?  If so,
>how big are they compared to equivalent C executables? If no, how many files
>would need to be distributed to run the application?
>

GNAT can of course produce standalone Windows EXEs. These are statically
linked to the GNAT runtime and thus relatively large. If you ask me, I
also stumbled across the 100 KB Hello World compiled by GNAT. I used to
care about executable size, I do no more. Hardisk space is ridiculously
cheap and if you deliver software, you burn it on CD anyways.

>2.  Are there "good" libraries available for GUI, Winsockets and database
>connectivity?

There are libraries for all of these, but I haven't tried many of them
myself. You might want to check out http://www.adapower.com It's an
excellent place for Ada programmers. For GUI, there are several Windows
GUI packages. There is a binding to GLADE, a GTK+ cross platform GUI
builder. There is a binding to Winsock. ODBC, MySQL and Postgres database
bindings do also exist, but they seem to be much lower level than, say ADO
in Visual Basic.

>
>3.  Are there any DirectX or libraries available for making games? (I have
>read the history of Ada and understand the goals but that doesn't mean Ada
>can't be used for fun!!!)

The nearest thing I recall is an Ada game package for Linux framebuffer
and X ;-)


Gerhard Haering