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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

How is the open source development story for Ada these days? Is there good "getting started" material? Are there many projects in Ada? I learned it in college and really liked it, but that was more than a decade ago at a point when there might've been an open source compiler and IDE but it was a pain to use and there weren't many open source libraries anyway. Hopefully things have improved in the interim?

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The AdaCore Learn site is pretty good to learn / get refreshed on Ada programming:

https://learn.adacore.com/index.html

Alire is a Cargo-like Ada package manager:

https://alire.ada.dev/

There has been increased interest in Ada as Rust has grown in popularity. There has even been some synergy and exchange of ideas.

Spark got Rust-style ownership of pointers:

https://blog.adacore.com/using-pointers-in-spark

AdaCore and Ferrous Systems are working together to help Rust get more formalized for future use in safety critical work.

Ferrous Systems recently released the Ferrocene Language Specification [2] to formally document the Rust subset that Ferrocene will use.

[1] https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/

[2] https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/ferrocene-language-specific...

Wow, this is super cool! Can't wait to dig in! Thanks for the links and information.

> Spark got Rust-style ownership of pointers:

To be more precise, it has introduced affine types.

Rust happens to be the more well know mainstream implementation of them.

A lot of Ada open source development uses Alire, which can install a toolchain for you: https://alire.ada.dev/

https://opensource.com/article/21/10/learn-ada-2021

Vscode/emac has Ada plugins as far as i know

The Adacore tutorials should be able to introduce you to the language if you're familiar enough with programming in general.

I did a few AOC problems in Ada and used it a lot.

There is an Ada specific IDE with a nice memory footprint at the link below. The continuous release version of Gnat Studio has just been released for anyone to use recently. If you want the payed for pro tools features and support, then there are downloads on adacore.com instead.

https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatstudio

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