[kristoff_it]

A language isn't just a compiler and a spec. I don't know the full history of all these projects, but IIRC Ada's compiler wasn't free for a long time.

How you structure the financials and the community around the language has also a gigantic impact on the final result, and this is an area where Zig bringing to the table something completely new.

https://ziglang.org/zsf/

[pjmlp]

Although most people associate Object Pascal to Borland due to the Turbo Pascal branding done by them, the language was originally created to write Lisa OS (Clascal), and then when the project got replaced by Mac OS, with the help of Niklaus Wirth input, Clascal became Object Pascal and was the main language until the C++ rewrite that took place in the early 90's.

Outside Apple computers, the dialects created by Borland gained such following, specially in Europe, that Turbo Pascal became the official Pascal dialect, even though Extended Pascal fixed most of the original design flaws.

Naturally they going enterpreisy lost the crowd to VB and VC++ folks (later .NET).

Modula-2 did have some nice offerings, specially on Amiga, but on the PC and Mac, Turbo/Object Pascal made it irrelevant as it offered all the improvements Modula-2 brought to the table (no one cared about co-routines on home computers back then).

Ada was the only one from those that yeah, actually quite expensive, and I think only SGI and SUN had UNIX compilers for them, with HP having BASIC and Pascal compilers for their OSes.

Then there was the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, the "LLVM" for the 1980's, which had support for C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam, and BASIC.

Looking forward to see how Zig evolves, specially regarding issues like #2301.