[pjmlp]

Ada might have failed on OS, but that is just because few startups that based their workstation OS in UNIX succeeded in the market at large.

C goes hand-in-hand with UNIX, so clearly no UNIX vendor would have it in their SDK and UNIX developers weren't willing to pay for tools.

As history has shown, the moment UNIX vendors started doing "Home" and "Pro" editions, GCC got lots of help.

As Ada talks at FOSDEM show, it is present everywhere where safety matters and its use has been slowly increasing since the Internet has shown how bad idea is to connect C code to the outside world.

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/byupdate?open=&start=1&count=10

[_yosefk]

I think there's much (~10x) more C code than Ada code everywhere where safety matters. (No hard data, just a feeling from experience - if you have hard data proving me wrong, do share.)

Also, it's not just Unix that's written in C or a descendant - there's also, well, Windows, and a load of embedded RTOSes.

If Ada made you as productive as C with extra benefits or something to that effect, you'd expect Ada to succeed at the marketplace at a scale at least comparable to C's - especially with the government support it had which put C at a disadvantage, not?

[pjmlp]

> I think there's much (~10x) more C code than Ada code everywhere where safety matters

Probably, but using C dialects and certification processes that make C just look like Ada with another syntax.

http://www.misra-c.com/MISRAChome/tabid/181/Default.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B

http://www.programmingresearch.com/solutions/medical-devices...

> Also, it's not just Unix that's written in C or a descendant - there's also, well, Windows, and a load of embedded RTOSes.

Windows did not exist when UNIX was created.

MS-DOS was based on CP/M which copied ideas from UNIX into home computers. So while C didn't had a special place in home computers, UNIX was gaining adoption in the enterprise even Microsoft had their own UNIX, Xenix.

Which they used to cross compile some of their MS-DOS applications.

So it was only natural that when they started developing Windows, they used their in-house languages and both Quick Basic and Quick Pascal were not that up to the task, leaving C as the option.

Embedded RTOS are traditionally POSIX compliant, wich leads again to C.

Microsof is actually moving away from C, this is why they don't care about compliance any longer and speak about C++ and .NET Native.

Even their latest C99 related changes are only related to what ANSI C++11/14 require and a few key open source projects that they wanted to see supported.

Which is kind of funny, because Microsoft was the last C compiler vendor in the home computing space, to add a C++ compiler to their tools, with Microsoft C/C++ 7.0.

> If Ada made you as productive as C with extra benefits or something to that effect, you'd expect Ada to succeed at the marketplace at a scale at least comparable to C's - especially with the government support it had which put C at a disadvantage, not?

Not if people are expected to pay for the compilers.