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Ada is still around, at a big enough level to keep 7 commercial vendors selling compilers.

Something unheard of, paying for software tools in 2024, who would imagine that.

it was depressing when RH dropped ada support. sure, it was gcc, but it was so nice to have an ada compiler part of the default gcc installation.

gnat needs money. well deserved. but adoption needs a free, easy to install compiler.

5 years ago i had the pleasure of resurrecting a dead system. it was about 30k of ada, lets call it ada 87 (!). unknown compiler, 32 bit, 68K processor, 16 MB memory, unknown OS.

code was compiling in 2 days, running in 2 weeks. i needed to change from using 32 bit floats to 64 bit floats (seems positional data is a little more accurate in 2020). 1 declaration in 1 package spec and a recompile, and all my positions are good.

i love that language!

Very cool project! Were you able to build a working 68K GNAT cross-compiler yourself, or did you purchase one from one of the major Ada vendors?

target was x86_64 / linux. just updated the rpm spec file for the gcc build to enable ada. rebuild and install.

so, changed wordsize, processor, operating system... minimal source code impact.

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