The GCC frontend has always been second-tier at best, and AdaCore is very expensive (it's technically GPL, but you will never get a copy, except directly from AdaCore with further contractual restrictions).
They finally released a "Community Edition", but you may only develop Open Source software with it.
It's a shame. Ada is really nice.
Ada is a really nice language that is fast, has lots of support for making sure programs are reliable, can run on desktops or microcontrollers, has a really good concurrency story and parallelism is coming next. I like the syntax a lot and was recently making some small programs and having a blast. That all changed when I found out I could only distribute my programs with the full source unless I paid adacore what is likely a lot of money (I can't be certain as it is not listed on their site). Technically, there is a GCC clause that allows you to distribute as closed source, but then you can't use any adacore libraries and it all seems tricky.
No thanks, I'm not even remotely interested in that kind of relationship. D will have to do for my use cases.
Commercial tools aren't a problem to me, but they need a tooling option for solo devs that don't work for a 5,000 person company on a military project.
Adacore seems like a neat company with a great product, but the current situation seems to be hindering language adoption outside of larger military contracts and university research
Either explain what you mean by this, or you're comment isn't useful. AFAIK GNAT is just the n-1 version of their commercial offering (for the base language) nothing's wrong with that..
ada is also very portable across vendors (since 2000 or so). the only language easier to go from vendor A to vendor B is fortran.
Are there other free Ada compilers out there or is the language too complex for simple enthusiasts to implement a compiler themselves?
Ada isn't owned by one company.
The language is at the same level as Haskell, OCaml, C++ or similar.