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Comment by sqldba | Hacker News Reader

Is Ada still around?

Yes. Latest language standard is Ada 2012.

Spark, a subset of Ada 2012 supports formal proofs of program properties ranging from absence of run-time errors to functional correctness (compliance of the code with formally specified requirements).

If you're curious, you can learn more at https://learn.adacore.com/courses/courses.html

More links:

https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/AdaCore-Tech-Cyber...

https://www.adacore.com/gems -> https://blog.adacore.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20190709111613/http://www.drdobb...

https://github.com/Componolit/libsparkcrypto

https://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk.craeynest/ada-belgium/ev...

https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/ePDF-Implementatio...

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1913

https://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada

Yes. It's often used in safety-critical systems as an alternative to C, though C is still significantly more common.

Ada, Fortran, and even Cobol, satisfy the needs of a given domain: safety-critical environments for Ada, scientific computing for Fortran, business transactions for Cobol.

They won't be replaced in the next decades, and even some new systems might be implemented in them.

Languages for production were often designed to address a set of (hard) problems, as opposed to general-purpose languages (Python, Java, C++, etc.)

Sure, there are some web servers/apps written in Fortran or Ada. But those are examples of what the languages can achieve, not how they are actually used in production.

It never went anywhere, still used for what it was used...

A lot of flight and safety critical software has gone c++ at least in the US. Do178b approved g++ clones started popping up about 25 years ago and have made dramatic inroads.

>g++ clones

What does this mean? Something like certified forks of g++?

There have been those. Also there have been closed source compilers with identical switches. I have always suspected copyright violations because the scope of writing a c++ compiler but who knows.

What? I just left a job in defense software that used Ada and it was a fairly new program.

So we agree.

It never went anywhere => ie. it never left.

Still used for what it was used => ie. the same kind of software (defense, etc).

I also misread that as “never took off”.

The expression is "never went away" then, as "never went anywhere" usually means it dudded.

Interesting to hear that. DOD no longer requires ADA, so many projects that did use it have converted to C++. There were even people brought in to do automated Ada-> C++ conversion a number of years ago.

With the creation of the MISRA C standards for JSF these memory safety issues have largely been accounted for in the MISRA standards review process.

MISRA C definitely makes many improvements in this area. However, writing decent Ada code is so much easier than writing C code that conforms to MISRA ( or JSF ) standards.

There's a pretty good comparison here: https://learn.adacore.com/courses/SPARK_for_the_MISRA_C_Deve...

> ... C ....

> ... these memory safety issues have largely been accounted for ...

Hahaha. Hahahahahaha.

Instead of laughing like a child maybe provide a defendable argument?

Once again largely, C is a language not the compiler providing its implementation.

Yep. UB means that your program could crash, but it also means it's valid for the compiler to print out a warning and do the right thing, or error, or anything.

A Lot of older languages like ADA are still around, up to date and have surprisingly active and friendly communities. The health and state of any language should probably not be judged by how popular or how often it is mentioned on hacker news.

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