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Comment by csb6 | Hacker News Reader

> I would love to get a list of language features that are "free to use with GNAT" and those that are "AdaCore license required."

All Ada language features are present in the free/open source version of the compiler. The proprietary version of GNAT is just updated more frequently I think and has commercial support - they periodically copy their changes into the main GCC source tree.

They have proprietary tools for some kinds of static analysis, but those wouldn’t be considered language features. GNATprove (the theorem prover tool for verifying SPARK programs) is open source.

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The last time I bought a license for AdaCore it was to get the unit testing, static analysis and dynamic analysis tools IIRC but, that was about 8-9 years ago. We also paid for training from AdaCore and their main guy came out.

How would you rate that experience?

AdaCore produces a good product and their technical team is top notch.

I think AdaCore stopped supporting GNAT community in 2022 and recommended to use Alire community, no?

https://blog.adacore.com/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source...

Alire is just a package and toolchain manager that AdaCore wrote in the style of Cargo. It still runs GNAT under the hood.

I don't think AdaCore was involved in the creation of alire:

https://zaguan.unizar.es/record/79726/files/texto_completo.p...

AdaCore does directly contribute to GNAT which is important.

GNAT was chosen for alire since it is free software: "This work presents a working prototype tailored to the Ada compiler available to open source enthusiasts, GNAT."

Other Ada implementations typically use their own build systems which are different from GNAT's and so they would probably need changes to work with alire.

Alire isn't written by adacore, it's an independent project though adacore has donated to them.

At this point it is becoming the de facto method of acquiring the toolchain and building Ada projects.

GNAT Community was just a version of the GNAT toolchain/IDE provided by AdaCore. GNAT is still open source and still updated as part of GCC, it is now just recommended to install it using the Alire package manager. Builds of GNAT are also provided on some distros since it is part of GCC.

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