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Comment by henrikeh | Hacker News Reader

It is disappointing that Ada seems to be completely shunned from all discussions of safe high-level languages despite having both a track record (several successful safety critical systems) and a unique feature set (multiple compilers, provably correct subset, ranged subtypes).

Is it purely a matter of what is well-branded?

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Ada also suffered from bad roots and bad timing. We're off a decade of simple dynamic languages. Ada seems like an old and immense ruin. Maybe there will be a julia/rust equivalent for Ada.

And it is very true -- Ada never truly gained any foothold in anything but situations where it truly delivered upon a requirement.

If anything, I can take solace in the fact that it is very much alive despite the exaggerated rumors of its death. I'd encourage everyone to try it out and steal all the ideas.

"Multiple compilers" will do little good if the compilers aren't generally available. The Ada problem is all about availability of good implementations. (And no, GCC doesn't cut it. Not in 2018 at least.)

Paying for a compiler isn't really as crazy as it sounds. Companies pay for CI, static analyzers etc. etc. For non-commercial applications it is obviously different.*

Yet, I'm genuinely curious, why isn't GCC up to snuff?

* Edit: Which of course limits general adoption.

Somehow it feels strange how many devs expect to be paid for their work, while blantly refusing to pay for the work of others.

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