[glass-z13]

I don't know if it's the algorithm but for the past few months i've been seeing bits and pieces in random places about ada. Is there a reason the language is seeing more traction lately? I would assume the whole White House "approved" languages had something to do with it

[ajdude]

Ada's been steadily making a reassurance I think since safer languages like Rust had started to gain traction. It appeared for the first time ever on the stackoverflow survey for example.

It used to be hampered down by confusing licenses but around 2021 those constraints were lifted when Adacore's "GNAT Community Edition" was retired. This was around the time Alire (works similar to if you combined Rustup with Cargo) came on the scene which meant getting the FSF version of the compiler was as trivial as running "alr toolchain --select".

The most recent standard came out in 2022 along with a more centered community. Most of the ada community was living in a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada) until a year ago, and now ada-lang.io is gaining a lot of traction.

Then Alire 2.0 just recently came out which made everything even more streamlined.

Ada has been my favorite language for years, so I'm happy to see more people noticing it.

[brabel]

I tried learning Ada a few years ago and was really put off by GNAT. Installation was something straight out of the 80's and I just forgot about it after a little fussing around without getting anything working.

Great to know that's no longer the experience with Ada, I might finally get it and try to start a project using it.

[riku_iki]

> Ada's been steadily making a reassurance I think since safer languages like Rust had started to gain traction

Why one would use Ada now when it looks like there are much stronger contenders in this space: rust for close to metal and C#, Java, Go for slower programs?

[fwip]

Ada has features built in that those languages do not have.

Off the top of my head, Ada has "restricted types" (e.g: you can say a function takes an integer of the range 5-15 only), as well as pre-and-post conditions you can annotate your procedure definition with.

[riku_iki]

It sounds like this can be implemented as some 3p libs, and not necessary be a part of language?

[ajdude]

I like in Ada's type system in that I can do constraints such as "type Positive is Integer range 1 .. Integer'Last;" to give me a number that I know must always be in the positive range of an integer, and it's easily readable in plain text.

From what I have read, trying to do something like "type Element is Integer range 100 .. 1000;" in rust requires something along the lines of

     struct BoundedU16<const MIN: u16, const MAX: u16>(u16);
     impl<const MIN: u16, const MAX: u16> BoundedU16<MIN, MAX> {
         pub const fn new(value: u16) -> Result<Self, BoundError> {
             if value >= MIN && value <= MAX {
                 Ok(Self(value))
             } else {
                 Err(BoundError(value, MIN, MAX))
             }
         }
     }

[crabbone]

Now how about using this type as an array index? In Ada, when you declare an array with this kind of type as an index, it automatically knows its size, generates a bunch of methods to help with iteration and element access, and these methods are "generic" in a sense that the programmer doesn't need to know the lowest or highest index of an array in order to iterate over it.

On the other hand: these types make life hard. Kind of like Rust's lifetimes. Sometimes obviously correct code doesn't compile and you need to twist and tie yourself into knots in order to get a much more convoluted version to compile. Well, like Rust.

They are indeed very similar, and require approximately the same level of pain tolerance.

[kevlar700]

Rust tries with a crate and traits but it misses out on e.g. record memory overlays which are so powerful in Ada. Type design is beautifully intuitive for the main part in Ada too. Restricting your parameters with ease means there is less logic to write and mistakes and refactor fallout gets caught early.

[kevlar700]

Honestly Ada is far better than Rust for close to metal as it was designed for it. It is also safer and easier to use than Rust. Ada has also been demonstrated to be more cost effective over a programs lifetime than C, C++ and Java. I also dropped Go for Ada and prefer the quality and memory control that Ada offers. The only thing I miss are the stdlib docs and the ease of cross compilation.

[lolinder]

> Ada is far better than Rust for close to metal as it was designed for it.

Sorry, can you elaborate on this? Rust was also designed to be close to the metal, so I'm assuming that there's some concrete difference that you're referring to.

> Ada has also been demonstrated to be more cost effective over a programs lifetime than C, C++ and Java.

Do you have a citation for this improved cost-effectiveness? Things like that are notoriously difficult to prove, so I'd be curious to know how this was measured.

[kevlar700]

Adas specification was developed competitively over a number of years with embedded development as well as the ability to replace all 450 languages in use by the D.O.D. at the time as requirements. Rusts first official specification is still in the works aside from the one created by AdaCore.

Representation clauses are just beautiful for embedded memory-mapped registers and network protocols and driver registers received over spi/i2c etc.. There is even built-in validity checking. No need to shift generally as the compiler does everything for you.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_Embedded_C_Dev...

The D.O.D study that includes Java would need to be dug up but this one is interesting too.

https://forum.ada-lang.io/t/comparing-the-development-costs-...

I only found out recently that the D.O.D. Ada mandate didn't say you had to use Ada. It said you had to demonstrate why your project would be more cost-effective than using Ada. Considering Ada was designed with cost-effectiveness/maintainability as a primary requirement then that was a difficult task.

[sevagh]

>Why one would use Ada now when it looks like there are much stronger contenders in this space: rust for close to metal and C#, Java, Go for slower programs?

Define stronger? C#, Go, Java probably by wide use in enterprise/industry, but Rust? Power of sunshine and rainbows? Wishful thinking?

[riku_iki]

> but Rust? Power of sunshine and rainbows? Wishful thinking?

adaptation, active community, more modern features, larger ecosystem

[kitd]

Oof! You were going so well .

[spauldo]

My guess? There have been a few high profile security CVEs lately and the "why are we still using C" crowd is louder than usual. Ada's a viable alternative for performant system code, and it's kind of the underdog to Rust.

[nicce]

Ada is not memory safe language tho, while it might make it a bit harder to introduce those bugs.

[ajdude]

Ada is memory safe if you just work with the stack or avoid Unchecked_Deallocation. Since functions can allocate and return entire arrays and other data structures completely on the stack, you don't need to mess with the heap that often (and when you do, you can also define your own memory pools).

If you have to use dynamic allocation, you could also use the built in container libraries or controlled types for additional safety.

Though if you want the kind of memory safety that Rust has, there's always SPARK (a subset of Ada).

[bluGill]

Is there a free version of SPARK? Proven correct code appeals to me, but I don't enjoy trying to get anything past purchasing.

[ajdude]

SPARK is free by default, and readily available. You can use it as-is in ada by adding " with SPARK_Mode => On" to your code; here's some examples: https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-spark/chapters/01...

You can install gnatprove with alire via "alr install gnatprove"

[mcguire]

It's been a while since I looked at SPARK and Ada, but the last time I did, SPARK was very well integrated with the GNAT Studio IDE.

I still preferred frama-c, because C, but it's a really nice toolchain.

[kevlar700]

Ada goes beyond memory safety.

[Barrin92]

I saw a fairly popular programming Twitch streamer / Youtuber put out a bunch of Ada content recently, don't know if it's cause or effect but content creators seem to have a bit of influence these days. Was definitely the case with the recent htmx wave.