Should Have Used Ada (SHUA) #1 – Goto Fail | Hacker News Reader

Should Have Used Ada (SHUA) #1 – Goto Fail

annexi-strayline.com

21 pointsjaypatelani8 comments

It's why we are planning on using Ada/SPARK2014 for our show control automation software and rewriting C drivers on the hardware being used for the show action equipment in SPARK2014. Nothing else is close at the moment. Looking forward to more SHUA!

I'm currently reviving an old project of mine to rewrite Unix core tools in Ada. It's like a dress rehearsal: if I can write simple stuff like cp, ls, cat, etc. in this cantankerous but powerful and safe language, I'll be set up to write more complicated stuff in it.

Wow best of luck. Do share us your progress.

Also if you are looking for community to chat with find here : https://matrix.to/#/#ada-lang_Lobby:gitter.im

Also worth checking http://ironclad.nongnu.org/ They might already have some tools.

This story makes me wonder if it's better to use Ada/SPARK than Rust, from a safety perspective.

It seems the root issue is atrocious sha1 hash calculation interface (openssl) not the language per se. What possible errors sha1 could return while updating a hash state from a byte buffer with a known size?

It's not the language per se, but Ada helps by being a bit more tedious on the initial implementation side, but vastly more helpful on the "okay, what the fuck did I write here, how does it work, and what happens when it fails?" side.

Sometimes, a good choice of language can help you mitigate sticky wickets that aren't language problems in their own right.

I think nobody could write correct applications in C without strict style guides (automatically checked), fat pointers and forbidding nul terminated strings in their code. Yes it's external to language. But presenting a deficient code base as a straw man is kinda silly.

I'm looking forward for SHUA series. Hope it would present real issues which couldn't be fixed with simple linter.

P.S. It would be interesting to delve into a history of open source ADA compilers and their features and availability in 1998 (openssl begins).

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