[indolering]

Ada's refusal to make their language any more approachable is a problem.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

What's unapproachable about it? And if your answer involves syntax, how do you explain Python?

[bluGill]

Mostly I have no clue how I would use it in my project without rewriting from scratch.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

You either write the main program in C and call Ada libaries, or you write the main program in Ada and call C libaries: https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/chapters/inte...

(And this seems pretty general; you'd have to do roughly the same thing to mix C/Rust, C/Pascal, Rust/Python, ...)

[bluGill]

Problem is my main program is c++ complete with the stl that makes it useful. Vectors unique-ptr and all the other weird stuff that makes c++ better that c.

[tsimionescu]

You still do the same thing that you would when calling a C library: you serialize your STL objects into plain C objects, pass them to the external library, and deserialize back. If you need callbacks, you make sure that they catch any exception and return an error code. It's really no different from virtually any other C++ interop.

There are a few languages that interop with C++ at a deeper level, essentially building a small part of a C++ compiler into their runtime. But they're relatively obscure - Clasp, an implementation of Common Lisp, is probably the only one that can really take an arbitrary C++ object (say, an std::vector<std::list<int>>) as an input to a Common Lisp function and work with it.

[MaxBarraclough]

> There are a few languages that interop with C++ at a deeper level, essentially building a small part of a C++ compiler into their runtime

The other approach is to compile to C++ source.

[bluGill]

now interoperability costs performance for all the serialize/deserialize operations and so the language is too slow to be practical.

[skissane]

I don’t think your problem has anything to do with Ada itself. You’d have the same issues using Rust or Go or Swift or Zig or whatever - if you make heavy use of C++’s features, it can make interop with other languages harder

[LiamPowell]

It's actually a little easier if you use GCC because you have interop at the class level: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gnat_ugn/Building-Mixed-Ada-a...

[bluGill]

100% It seems like any language other than C has poor interoperability with anything other than C. C++ doesn't know how to deal with the rust borrow checker. Go will have issues with both.

D is an exception - D supports C++ (I'm not sure how or how well, but they at least have some C++ ABI constructors). there are others (some languages running on the JVM usually work with java not C)