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Why not FSF’s GNAT? It’s been a while since I used it, but I remember preferring its error messages to some commercial offering we had around.

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SPARK [0], to put it simply. Contracts and static analysis rather than runtime checks takes Ada from being good to being great.

I do prefer GNAT's error messages over AdaCore's compilers (despite the compiler frontend still being based on GNAT), but SPARK adds a ton.

[0] I should note that SPARK 2014 is also available as a GPL'd "community" edition.

EDIT: Asterisk + HN formatting

AdaCore's compiler is GNAT.

They sell a pro version with bells and whistles but AFAIK the actual compiler is the same.

You can't use a lot of the libraries and still get the runtime exception to where it doesn't have to be released as GPL I think.

GNAT Community version does not offer support for old versions of Ada, GNAT Pro does, but at the same time GCC's Ada (gcc-ada is the package for Arch Linux, for example) supports all versions of Ada. Funny that. I cannot say I am completely happy with the way they are trying to get money.

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