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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

It has more to do with tooling than programmers. C++ is used everywhere so there are many commercial tools to support it. Not so much for Ada.

Ada's developmemt tools are fewer, less featued, and more costly due to low demand.

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There are 7 compiler vendors still in business, if anything Ada's domain is one of the fews where paying for tools one needs to do their job is still a thing, like in most professions.

> Ada's developmemt tools are fewer, less featued

Such as?

Regarding the number of options, C++ has quite a few IDEs: Visual Studio, Xcode, VSCode, CLion, and probably more (Oracle probably still sells the one they had for Solaris). For command-line compilers, C++ has: Visual Studio, Xcode, g++, clang++, IBM C++ compilers for their OSs, Oracle compilers for Solaris, etc.

For Ada, is there anything other than AdaCore? Is that the same as GNATStudio?

Edit* - fixed Ada capitalization

I think IBM Rational Ada was a thing back then. Never used it but heard stories about it.

I should add, what I was told is that they were amazing, especially the pre-IBM Rational stuff. Rational was acquired by IBM in 2003. I was working on tech adjacent to the JSF (F35). I was told by a guy working on the JSF that the extra bugs from C++ would mean better job security and he was 100% right. It’s pretty much that conversation that triggered my move into high tech and away from military. I think it’s a shame that IBM happened to Rational, a lot of nascent good ideas pretty much disappeared or were mangled beyond recognition.

>It’s pretty much that conversation that triggered my move into high tech and away from military.

Could you elaborate on this please? What is "high tech" here?

High tech is cutting edge tech, I.e. applied research at big tech.

Do you have any specific example of such jobs?

Data science / machine learning

The kind of tooling you need for avionics is not necessarily the kind of tooling you use for non-safety critical code.

None of the tools mentioned, other than in limited level IDEs (for practical purposes in safety critical C++ expect some niche variation of Eclipse just like if you used Ada) are valid for the F-35 project.

You don't have to use AdaCore's GNAT Studio. You can quickly get going with Ada/SPARK using Visual Studio Code, as there is an LSP extension for it published by AdaCore themselves.

Netbeans is the Solaris IDE. It is free.

There's GNAT, augusta, byron, hac, janus, apex, Greenhills, xgc compilers.

Each of those has an optional IDE. All of the IDEs you mentioned also support Ada.

Want a compiler? I hope you like GNAT.

Want an IDE? I hope you like GNAT Pro Studio.

Want a static analysis tool? I hope you like CodePeer.

Want to do unit testing? I hope you like Rapita.

That's not quite true. There are multiple vendors providing Ada compilers to industry: https://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada?tab=readme-ov-file#co...

Ada compilers: PTC ApexAda, GreenHills Ada, Static analysis tools for Ada: CodePeer, ConQAT,Fluctuat,,LDRA Testbed,MALPAS,Polyspace,SofCheck Inspector,Squore,Understand. Similar list for all other things.

When C++ was chosen for F-35 there were more verification tools to Ada than C++.

For C++ on similar systems its becoming more and more "I hope you like LLVM with the serial numbers filed off". Lots of the tool vendors are sunsetting their bespoke compilers. Most of the vendor IDEs have always been Eclipse with a bunch of bundled plugins.

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