Re: What is wrong with Ada?

[Markus E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"martinbishop" <jedibebop@gmail.com> writes:

> On Apr 9, 8:25 pm, Brian May <b...@snoopy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>> >>>>> "martinbishop" == martinbishop  <jedibe...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>     martinbishop> I've never been scared of "non mainstream"
>>     martinbishop> languages, but I was wondering, what is wrong with
>>     martinbishop> Ada?  Why don't more people use it?  What do most
>>     martinbishop> people think of it?  To me, it seems like a nice,
>>     martinbishop> concise, and safe language, but I haven't used it
>>     martinbishop> yet.
>>
>> This was discussed recently.
>>
>> Seehttp://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.lang.ada/browse_thread/thread/...
>> --
>> Brian May <b...@snoopy.apana.org.au>
>
> Ahh, Thanks for that.
>
> I've seen Ada "benchmarks", and it seems the compiler is great, and
> the language seems really nice (verbose, but I kind of like that over
> languages like Haskell and such).  I figured most people didn't use it
> for business or just general popularity reasons, but I thought there
> might be some hidden "bad things" or something.

One "bad" thing (but that might not touch you) is availability of
compilers: There is a number of plain commercial compilers, some stuff
that is free as in beer (i.e. not avialable in 2 years from now) and
finally GNAT. GNAT comes in 2 versions: The FSF version which has a
run time with a linking exception and the AdaCore version which is
either available with a GPL runtime license or a (not quite so cheap)
paid license which has a linking excepetion.

That means, with the AdaCore "free" version you can only build GPLed
software, since the runtime is linked against the executable. 

It is, I think, important to point that out, since here the situation
is different from what is custom with other "free" compilation systems
(where the use of a certain compiler rarely affects the license under
which you have to distribute your executables).

Problem with the FSF version (which would have the linikng exception)
is, that it is integrated in the GCC source tree now, but there are no
QC'd releases with GCC, so its not always in a good shape, the efforts
of various vounteers notwithstanding.

Also support for compiler versions on various platforms (Windows,
Linux, *BSD, VMS, ...) is varies: The Linux support is really good
(esp. on Debian), but often only old or unstable versions (Windows:
AFAIK you only get a old MingW version or 3.15p), or the AdaCore
version is available. For VMS it has been a long time anybody has
actually seen a free version.

(My research might not be up to date any more, so anybody here in
c.l.a. is welcome to correct me here).

One further thing you might consider, is, that AdaCore recently has
stripped the linking exception from a number of libraries (Florist,
GtkAda, PolyOrb) which they partly developed and traditionally
maintained. No community fork has happened at the time which preserved
the original more liberal licenses, so at the moment a number of
important libraries are only publicly available for GPL development.

This again is different from what you'll find in other language
communities. Most other languages (to take on example) have either no
GTK binding (which often is an indication that the language has only
few followers any more or is not used for user application
programming) or if it exists, it is under LGPL or similar. With Ada
the situation is different: GtkAda is under strict GPL and doesn't
even compile with other (Windows or Linux PC) Ada compilers
AFAIK. Other bindings are completely platform specific (like CLAW) and
proprietary. (Again that might not be a bad thing dependend on what
you intend to do with it).

You'll find similar situation for a number of other libraries.

There are free libraries, though, like Tash (a Ada-Tk binding) and a
number of excellent data structure and container libaries.

So to wrap it up: There is nothing wrong with the language per se, but
dependend on what you might want to do with it, the availability of
tools and libraries and the conditions to which they are available
might affect you or not.

Regards -- Markus