Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

manufacturing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 203 posts

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#21

Post by nl »

_1gwx wrote: post #6

Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…

I did Ada at Uni.

I think it's an ok language but its Pascal roots show. In an alternate universe where Pascal won instead of C (which it nearly did!) it might have ended up where C++ is.

Pascal being the choice for Systems programming instead of C nearly happened. One of the first things Ken Thompson and Bill Joy wrote for BSD was Pascal, and the Apple Lisa system was mostly written in Pascal.

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#22

Post by protomyth »

_1gwx wrote: post #6

Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…

I could get Turbo C or Turbo Pascal, there was no Turbo Ada. It has never had a compiler / IDE that made it easy to write Windows or Mac applications.

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#23

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

nl wrote: post #21
_1gwx wrote: post #6

Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…

I did Ada at Uni. I think it's an ok language but its Pascal roots show. In an alternate universe where Pascal won instead of C (which it nearly did!) it might have ended up where C++ is. Pascal being the choice for Systems programming instead of C nearly happened. One of the first things Ken Thompson and Bill Joy wrote for BSD was Pascal, and the Apple Lisa system was mostly written in Pascal.

Honestly, I wonder why Pascal doesn't dominate, too. Safer than C while still just as powerful, "teaching language" (easy to learn) but used for serious software (as you note, Apple used it for system programming). FPC is amazingly feature rich.

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#24

Post by acomjean »

At the beginning of the century I worked at a company that used Ada for radar software. As it became clear the hpux and Solaris (pa-risc and sparc) where being replaced by Linux On x86 and my company had AdaCore come in and do training in the new toolset (rational not providing Ada compilers for Linux)

AdaCore were quite knowledgeable as a company company offering a supported vendor of gnu Ada. I think they’re Still involved heavily in the development of the free ada compiler “GNAT” (part to gcc)

https://www.adacore.com/get-started

Defense companies liked open source vendors to take risk off and I’m not sure how it worked but some Ada compilers were “validated”

I grew to like Ada, (it has some warts, strings for example, but we didn’t use them often)

GNAT Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAT

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#25

Post by moonchild »

_1gwx wrote: post #6

Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…

> ADA/Spark allows for formal verification, which C/Rust do not have to my understanding.

Check out Frama-C: https://frama-c.com/

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#26

Post by baybal2 »

_1gwx wrote: post #6

Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…

> Why is ADA not adopted more broadly?

Productivity, and the general labour intensity.

Formal verification is not critical for the lion share of all software, and people obviously would like to save man hours by not dealing with it.

Second is the availability of developers. Not many people even now what formal verification actually is, let alone see rationale for learning verification driven development.

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#28

Post by kats »

_1gwx wrote: post #6

Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…

It requires a license to use GNAT for commercial projects, it's not free like many C/C++ tools.

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#29

Post by baq »

adamnemecek wrote: post #16
atlgator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any better books you recommend?

Programming Rust by O'Reilly, haha.

I get why this is downvoted but it is solid advice: in C you absolutely have to track ownership and lifetimes of pointers and pointees, but the compiler is free to not help you in any way. Learning rust will make you a better programmer. Thus, the recommendation is very good.

Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

#30

Post by non-entity »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #23
nl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did Ada at Uni. I think it's an ok language but its Pascal roots show. In an alternate universe where Pascal won instead of C (which it nearly did!) it might have ended up where C++ is. Pascal being the choice for Systems programming instead of C nearly happened. One of the first things Ken Thompson and Bill Joy wrote for BSD was Pascal, and the Apple Lisa system was mostly written in Pascal.

Honestly, I wonder why Pascal doesn't dominate, too. Safer than C while still just as powerful, "teaching language" (easy to learn) but used for serious software (as you note, Apple used it for system programming). FPC is amazingly feature rich.

> "teaching language" (easy to learn)

I think that worked against it as well.

Post reply on HN