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Comment by bobowzki | Hacker News Reader

Don't know much about pricing and IP since I've only been doing open source/hobby projects... But I've heard this complain a lot. Maybe it has something to do with that when Ada is used it's often for very high stake projects, and they need very expensive insurance?

> I know I'd certainly feel safer riding on pretty much any transportation written in Ada over C or C++.

Indeed.

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Nah, mostly it's just (IMO) the result of AdaCore being needlessly confusing. AdaCore also maintains the GNU compiler, which is what their Pro offering is based on. I'm not really sure why the Community edition exists, as it's basically at most a slightly different version than the GNU offering.

Someone showed me that GCC Ada supports older versions of Ada, while AdaCore's Community edition does not. There are other differences of which I am unaware, but I found this difference to be a particularly major and surprising one.

I'm not sure what you mean. Ada hasn't ever undergone any breaking changes I'm aware of, so even Ada 83 would be valid Ada 2012. I'm not sure how a compiler could lose support of older versions.

The only difference I've ever run into was an AdaCore-defined (as in not part of the standard) aspect that was known but not fully implemented by GCC Ada, while the Community edition did have it. That's since been added to GCC as well.

> Don't know much about pricing and IP since I've only been doing open source/hobby projects... But I've heard this complain[t] a lot.

That would be because they don't have any pricing information on their website, so you need to plan for it costing ℵ_{0}.

Yea, you have to send them an email so they can figure out what the cost would be. That always makes me nervous.

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