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by OnlyOneCannolo 1824 days ago
Ada is mostly used by professionals, not enthusiasts. It has a captive audience of governments and companies working on safety-critical systems where they have strict toolchain requirements or legacy systems. Pretty much the only thing that can move those users off Ada is to retire older systems, and rebuild their processes for C++. That's tough to justify when the language and ecosystem are still actively developed (paid, not free tools). Things like a language server are unimportant when your IDE must be qualified, and you're not allowed to install or use any software of your choosing. You will never see most of what goes on with Ada outside of a work environment. Its continued use is largely unaffected by anything you'd see in the open source community.
1 comments
vintermann 1824 days ago
> Ada is mostly used by professionals, not enthusiasts.

A polite way of saying it's rarely used willingly.

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OnlyOneCannolo 1824 days ago
That's not at all what I'm saying. Aside from web development, most professional tools are only used by professionals because they cost money. It wouldn't make sense to judge something by the free toy versions that happen to exist.
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vintermann 1814 days ago
GNAT is far from a toy.
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WastingMyTime89 1824 days ago
It had no free complier for a long time and a good IDE is still quite expensive.

Overall, it's a pretty nice language.

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Jtsummers 1824 days ago
GNAT has existed since 1996. It’s had a free compiler for a very long time.
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WastingMyTime89 1824 days ago
Ada was released in 1980. It finally got a free compiler when the Air Force paid for one in 1995 fifteen years later and it took until 2001 for this code to finally be merged with the rest of GCC.

It definitely had no free compiler for a long time.

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Jtsummers 1824 days ago
That it took 16 years to develop a free compiler for a relatively niche language in the era when relatively few people were online yet in any meaningful sense is not terribly shocking.

The language, going with the date of the first spec, is now 41 years old. So 25 years of its existence, there has been a free compiler. Quite a bit longer than the time spent without one.

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modshatereality 1824 days ago
What language has a better type system?
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