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pjmlp

Here is another one, Ada Core is the only Ada vendor.

There are still 7 companies around selling Ada compilers, granted not all of them support the very latest standard.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

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I’m kind of dismayed that none of these vendors seem to have a form with a buy button. Leads me to expect a lot of licensing problems.

But when you're coming from an open source perspective, or just expect tools to be free, like they mostly are for other languages (and should be imo), then those other vendors don't matter as you cannot afford them anyway and AdaCore becomes the only vendor, you can't afford gnatpro either btw.

Not everything has to be free beer.

Yeah, only if you want an appreciable number of people to use it.

There will never be an appreciable number of people writing the kind of software that justifies the use of Ada. If your project needs it, the cost isn't a concern.

Ada is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on safety and contract-oriented programming. There's a lot of software written in e.g. C++ today where Ada would be perfectly justified, if only it was more widespread and accessible.

Here's one unusual example, a BSD package manager written in Ada: https://github.com/jrmarino/synth

You definitely could write a lot more in Ada. The world would be a lot better off for it. Unfortunately, with the way things are going right now, I don't think it will happen. It takes a lot of active convincing to keep people from writing absolutely everything in JavaScript, so I don't think we'll be able to get to a point where Ada's ecosystem will be built out enough for it to be a common general-purpose language.

Like Windows, Mac, Oracle, z/OS, Photoshop or IDA Pro?

There are enough to keep 7 companies alive selling their compilers.

Green Hills Software is such a excellent producer of software, near perfection in every product...and no the Homepage is not a buy-able product of them ;)

If there are 7 companies selling compilers + FSF GNAT how can Ada Core be the only vendor?

That is the myth, duh.

I also first misread it tbh, putting the statement in quotes would have made it more obvious.

Thinking before writing would made it more obvious too.

Clearing up myths about Ada. You overlooked that context.

> I’m writing these in the truthful form, rather than stating the myth.

And it seems you overlooked the article. Anyone coming to the comments after reading the article can be forgiven for being confused by the reversal that happened here.

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