Hacker News Reader

Yet, 7 companies are still in business selling Ada compilers, in a world where most devs refuse to pay for tools while expecting to be paid themselves.

View on HN

And presumably they're all selling almost exclusively to the aerospace industry. There's like a dozen COBOL compiler vendors too. It's not indicative of the health of the language ecosystem.

Ada is used all over the place in high integrity computing, that is much more than aerospace.

Well, COBOL just got ISO COBOL 2023 out of the door, and both Visual COBOL and NetCOBOL, still offer a much better development experience than many FOSS toolchains.

Tell that to the largest company in the world, Nvidia that adopted SPARK for their high-integrity, high-security firmware.

I find Ada/SPARK2014 much easier to learn than Rust, and given its legacy, Ada programmers are of a higher quality for the high-integrity market than Rust at the moment. The fandom of Rust is a positive and attracts a lot of early adopters, but it still does not approach the portfolio of high-integrity software out there in Ada/SPARK2014.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com