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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

If I recall correctly (it's been a while) a good way is to use Ada fixed-length strings wherever you can, and use something like Dmitry Kazakov's UTF-8 library in other places. People often use unbounded strings in places they don't need to instead of declaring a fixed-length string when it's needed.

Nice to see somebody's still using Ada. I gave up on it for new projects because of the lack of infrastructure and 3rd party libraries. It seems that half of comp.lang.ada consists of professionals from the aerospace and embedded systems industry and the other half are crackpots who want to create a Caesar cipher plus spam. It always looked like a weird community to me (but that has indirectly to do with how Adacore conduct their business).

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> It always looked like a weird community to me (but that has indirectly to do with how Adacore conduct their business).

I don't know the community (or communities), but yeah, Adacore looks like a special beast. I saw a few discussions on their damn stringS, and lately a bit of discussion on array literals I believe, which left be rather sceptical.

I tried to use one of their languages, Parasail, and I couldn't. I tried to compile it, and failed, even after correcting a few layer of mistakes. Then I tried to use the binary, and only half of the proposed binary tools worked ; and I couldn't figure out how to use the working half to build/run a source file located outside of the compiler/interpreter archive tree...

And that was a version number 8.x, published after over 10 years of development... I just don't get it; I don't get how you can just dump something like that; I don't get how you haven't fixed problems known for years or that you'd encounter for sure if you only bothered to try to make a clean install on a fresh machine instead of dumping your working copy. Even getting the package was a pain for me, because it was hosted on a Google Drive (you don't even know it when you click because it is hidden behind a link shortener service! why? don't ask me), and none of the 3 browsers on my computer will display that damn site correctly, I had to fetch the package from another computer. Why can't they simply put their package on their webserver? It's not like it's ever going to be popular and generate lots of traffic with its single 50Mo zip :-)

I mean, I have zero love for the modern trends in development and methodology I meet a bit everywhere and which occupy a lot of threads and are often praised here, but this... this is extremely on the other end of the spectrum. It's like coming back to the bad practices of the DOS days (not even the good ones).

To be fair, Parasail is absolutely not a major focus for Adacore. I'm also pretty sure it's a personal project they picked up from a hire - but maybe don't quote me on that. I suspect it would end up 'odd' almost no matter which company had ended up picking it up.

That said, this is absolutely the kind of thing I kind of expect from Adacore. It's actually been getting better, but for a long time they didn't really care too much about this kind of stuff. A few folks at Adacore have picked up the cause recently though and things have been improving. But unfortunately cruft often doesn't go away so easily.

Yes it was.

ParaSail author was already working on it before being hired by Ada Core.

Interestingly I tried ParaSail just a few days ago. Downloaded the src, Followed instructions to make and the second attempt worked. (I got an error message about Gtk package linking, there is an option all-no-gtk or so for make and then it worked). This even on my Pinebook Pro with ARM processor on Armbian.

So if someone wants to try ParaSail, an interesting approach to have implicit (and explicit) parallelism in a programming language which also tries to be small (as in amount of language definitions and special cases) and readable language I would suggest to try.

Brand new discussion room here: https://gitter.im/parasail-lang/community (Gitter / Matrix )

I think, there are that same many ways to use Ada strings as C/C++. Ada and UTF-8 works very nice out of the box, it doesn't need any 3rd parties libraries (at least I never needed them and I use both each day :)).

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "lack of infrastructure"? About 3rd party libraries, that's true, Ada is far behind more popular languages but due to it nice binding capabilities it is not a problem to use C or C++ libraries in the Ada projects.

About comp.lang.ada I can say too much, I don't spend much time there. To be honest I stopped using Usenet many years ago. Many people who can help you with Ada related problems are on Stack Overflow, Reddit or Gitter too. I think list here: https://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada#Community is the best place to start to ask for help.

And about the language popularity: as for someone who is inside it, probably it looks for me too optimistic. :) But I think in the last few months Ada got a second (small, but second) chance.

I don't think I've ever seen anybody else suggest using fixed-length strings in place of unbounded strings. I don't think I'd suggest that either. It's like suggesting C++ folks use c-strings in favor of std::string if they can. Unless dynamic memory is a problem, why care?

I have only heard good things about Dmity Kazakov's library though, so if you need UTF-8 stuff, that would probably be the way to go.

There is now 3rd party library support for ada :

https://alire.ada.dev/

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