Ada 2022

https://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/ada22/

by tosh • 5 months ago

154 38 5 months ago

adaic.org

rustyhancock• 5 months ago

My understanding is that most of Adas users are maintaining legacy systems.

It'd be great to hear from anyone who is using it today by choice.

metalliqaz2• 5 months ago

The Ada stronghold is aerospace and defense systems. So these may or may not be legacy systems, but they are safety-critical or mission-critical systems that rely on long standing well defined development processes. That inflexibility means that advancements in the technology are very slow to creep into usage. That goes not only for the languages/compilers but also the silicon and everything in between.

krior• 5 months ago

The same can be said for Cobol and its relarionship with banking, but you will struggle to find anyone not categorizing cobol as legacy.

Linux-Fan• 5 months ago

After some search for programming languages which promise to reduce the number of bugs, I decided to give Ada (2012) a try.

I like it better than C and C++ and the compiler is included in Debian in a reasonably recent version that it can compile the code that I need.

Ada is particularly nice for programming RPI 2040 microcontrollers because for my needs I didn't need additional libraries. For both of my RPI 2040 projects (one of which is online here: https://masysma.net/37/dcf77_vfd_raspi_clock.xhtml), my code had fewer bugs than I had anticipated.

For general purpose systems programming the lack of free software libraries is still a concern e.g. while working on a custom backup restore program I had to write my own LZ4 extractor and Blake3 hash function implementation because there wasn't any existing libraries that I could find for the purpose.

kqr2• 5 months ago

In my experience it is trivial to call out to C libraries from Ada. You run a tool to convert the header file to Ada syntax, you link in the C library, and then you call the C code as if it were Ada code.

That's probably why you don't find LZ4 and Blake3 libraries. You forgot to look for the C libraries, which many Ada users would use.

jmccaf• 5 months ago

My workplace uses Ada SPARK for high-integrity automotive software, ported from C or C++. IIUC, the contracts and static proofs can replace some activities like isolated unit tests for C++ .

https://www.wevolver.com/article/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-us...

ajxs2• 5 months ago

I use Ada for a lot of projects where C would otherwise be the default language of choice. I find that I spend much less time getting tied up debugging silly errors. In a lot of cases, Ada makes it difficult to do things the wrong way. When I move from working in C to Ada, there isn't much I miss, but when I move the other way around, I feel like I'm missing so much!

gte525u• 5 months ago

We used it for a new Defense/Aerospace projects. Language-wise it's fine although verbose. Intent was to separate similar IP so there was no claim of cross contamination. Built-in threading and a robust standard library is nice.

Tool-wise - refactoring was a bit of a pain.

ajxs2• 5 months ago

Tool-wise - refactoring was a bit of a pain.

Could you share what tools you were using, and what you felt was missing? I write Ada in vscode, because it's what I use in my dayjob. AdaCore's plugin has good language support^1, but I don't use it for much other than formatting, or expect sophisticated automated refactoring functionality from it.

^1: It's still missing support for some Ada202x features. I can't wait for it to support `return when...`.

docandrew• 5 months ago

I use it for many of my side projects. I just like the language, the strong typing fits well with my work.

RavSS• 5 months ago

I've used it in my personal hobby projects for several years now, Ada/SPARK is a favourite language of mine. It's not a legacy language and it has features which I wish mainstream languages would have, particularly regarding the formal verification utilities of SPARK. It's also great for bare metal development.

I've not managed to convince anyone else to use it, as most are discouraged by either its Pascal-style "verbose" syntax on first glance or its general lack of third-party libraries (relative to something like Rust's ecosystem). Anyone who can get past those aspects should really give it a try.

adrian_b• 5 months ago

The abstract syntax of Ada is in many cases superior to that of the C-derived languages, but I also dislike its verbosity.

At least for personal projects, the verbosity can easily be avoided by using a preprocessor for the Ada source files. This is what I do.

Unfortunately, this would seldom be considered acceptable in a business context, because the non-standard appearance of the language would be considered an obstacle for developers unfamiliar with it, so it would complicate the future maintenance of a project.

It would have been nice if one of the revisions of the Ada language would have provided a standard set of abbreviations, e.g. for using various kinds of Unicode bracket symbols instead of the keywords currently used for this purpose.

There would have been nothing unusual in this. In the past many programming languages have defined alternative representations for the tokens, both a verbose representation and an abbreviated representation that may use more symbols, for instance PL/I and ALGOL 68.

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

There is enough business to keep 7 compiler vendors in business, those customers that actually pay for compilers.

I can provide the list, in case you don't find it from previous comments.

Also NVidia rather use Ada/SPARK instead of Rust for their automotive systems.

Danidada• 5 months ago

In case anyone is curious about an overview of the actual changes: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22over/html/Ov22-TOC.html

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

Thanks!

phplovesong2• 5 months ago

Many ada devs probably write software i would not be comfortable writing. Its always been a kind of place i dont want to be part of.

zardo• 5 months ago

I wonder what Ada Lovelace would think about her namesake being the language for weapon systems.

zorobo• 5 months ago

I’d rather fly in an airplane with a system coded in Ada/Spark rather than Python ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

graemep• 5 months ago

She was an aristocrat in the greatest empire the world had ever seen. She is unlikely to have objected to weapons systems per se.

sam_bristow• 5 months ago

Assuming your discomfort is around the defense side of things here's an example of a diving reberather system using Spark/Ada from a while back.

https://youtu.be/zL9vVs5vHuQ?si=-thG-FkelkW6oFfb

Jtsummers• 5 months ago

It's used for planes, trains, and automobiles. No reason to feel uncomfortable working on those things.

phplovesong2• 5 months ago

Honestly i would be shit scared writing software for planes/trains etc. One bug can literally cost multiple lives. I rather have less stress in my life.

inkyoto• 5 months ago

What are we comparing Ada to… PHP?

johnisgood• 5 months ago

If you want to learn Ada / SPARK, try https://learn.adacore.com/index.html.

kqr2• 5 months ago

I'll also plug my no-nonsense guessing game tutorial for getting started with Ada quickly: https://entropicthoughts.com/guessing-game-ada-style

tgv• 5 months ago

It's ok, but not more than that. I dabbled a bit in Ada, and while that link has a lot of information, it's far from complete. Unfortunately, there isn't much more information on the internet. It can be difficult to find answers.

One thing that document doesn't mention is alire, which is a rather complete tooling. If you want to try out ada, check out https://docs.adacore.com/live/wave/alire/html/alire/index.ht...

I also learned a bit of SPARK, and there the situation is much worse. The Adacore link shows less than the bare minimum: I couldn't get my simple programs (AoC) to the "silver" level, where it passes all checks, let alone "gold", where you actually prove correctness. The rest of the internet is practically barren when you search for SPARK. I got a second-hand copy of Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK; John W. McCormick, Peter C. Chapin. It contains complete examples, and explains the concepts pretty much in depth. Unfortunately, the book is expensive, and since I was just dabbling, I got the cheapest, which was the 2015 edition, which lacks later changes.

There's an Ada forum (https://forum.ada-lang.io/), but it is not very active, and questions may not be answered.

antiquark• 5 months ago

Ada doesn't even have a "++" operator to increment a number. SAD!

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

It isn't a language to do golf programming, indeed.

klez• 5 months ago

Neither does python, yet here we are.

hackerInnen• 5 months ago

Over the past couple of years I have been quite obsessed with VHDL. Somehow I like the strict typing much better than verilog.

I should give Ada a try and build something fun with both of them

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

I feel at home in PL/SQL for similar reasons.

deterministic• 4 months ago

Is SPARK available for free?

Ada 2022

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