[Raphael_Amiard]

> Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later languages have become much more complex than Ada

I don’t think you really understand what you’re saying here. I have worked on an ada compiler for the best part of a decade. It’s one of the most complex languages there is, up there with C++ and C#, and probably rust

[leoc]

Mind you, that suggests that the sentence is at least half-true even if "much more complex" is a big overstatement, since Rust, "modern" C++ and the later evolutions of C# are all relatively recent. (What would have compared to Ada in complexity back in the day? Common Lisp, Algol 68?)

As a matter of general interest, what features or elements of Ada make it particularly hard to compile, or compile well? (And are there parts which look like they might be difficult to manage but aren't?)

[Raphael_Amiard]

You're right in your first part. Ada 83 is less complex than modern C++ or Rust. However Ada kept evolving, and a lot of complexity was added in later revisions, such as Ada 95, which added a kind of bastardized and very complex Java style object model layer.

Ada features that are hard to compile are very common in the language. It is generally a language that is hard to compile to efficient code, because rules were conceived in an abstract notion of what safety is. But in general Ada is an extremely over specified language, which leaves very little space to interpretation. You can check the Ada reference manual if you want, which is a use 1000 pages book (http://www.ada-auth.org/arm.html)

* Array types are very powerful and very complicated * Tasking & threading are specified in the language, which seems good on paper, but the abstractions are not very efficient and of tremendous complexity to implement. * Ada's generic model is very hard to compile efficiently. It was designed in a way that tried to make it possible to compile down both to a "shared implementation" approach, as well as down to a monomorphized approach. Mistakes were done down the line wrt the specification of generics which made compiling them to shared generics almost impossible, which is why some compiler vendors didn't support some features of the language at all. * Ada scoping & module system is of immense complexity * The type system is very vast. Ada's name & type resolution algorithm is extremely complex to implement. functions can be overloaded on both parameters & return types, and there is a enclosing context that determines which overloads will be used in the end. On top of that you have preferences rules for some functions & types, subtyping, derived types, etc ...

This is just what comes to mind on a late Friday evening :) I would say that the language is so complex that writing a new compiler is one of those herculean efforts that reach similar heights as writing a new C++ compiler. That's just a fe

[GhosT078]

And despite all that complexity, you make it work very well (I've used GNAT since about 2002).

[feelamee]

what do you mean under Ada's complexity? E.g. C++ is really complex because of a lot of features which badly interoperate between themselves. Is this true for the Ada lang/compiler? Or do you mean the whole complexity of ideas included in Ada - like proof of Poincaré conjecture complex for unprepared person.

[Raphael_Amiard]

"Is this true for the Ada lang/compiler"

Yes, Ada has a lot of the same kind of fractal complexity that C++ has, which derives from unforeseen interaction of some features with some other.

On top of that, as I said in another comment, features are extremely overspecified. The standard specifies what has to be done in every edge case, often with a specification that is not very practical to implement efficiently

[microtherion]

I imagine Swift is also a very difficult language to compile.

[HackerThemAll]

and Julia