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Rust's cutting edge compiler is free, for one thing. I love Ada, but Adacore may well have killed any chance it had of being a commercially viable language (its use declines precipitously each year, even in the defense and avionics industries where it used to be strong).

Plus, Rust has a thriving community whereas thanks to Adacore, Ada has a dying one. Community is critical for programming languages.

But otherwise, Ada is a brilliant and ultra safe language whose safety features go far beyond the memory and type safety that Rust features.

It's a shame.




If anything Adacore has helped Ada a lot.

It is the only Ada compiler available for free, fully updated to Ada 2012, with all the remaining ones are still on their 90's style prices.

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/objectada

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/ (frozen in Ada 95)

Thanks to them Ada has become a regular presence at FOSDEM and is being teached at quite a few European university.


according to wikipedia, their 'free' compiler is GPL without a linking exception. the comparison chart on their page also says it is 'for open source GPL software'.


Apparently people keep forgetting without GPL, Linux would never happened.


GPL for an OS is I've thing. GPL for a compiler and runtime is entirely another, since only the latter forces any project you create with it too carry the GPL license.


Ah you mean gcc, the compiler that everyone ignored until Sun started the trend of UNIX vendors to charge for their compilers.


GPL's runtime isn't GPL, it's got the runtime exception:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html


Sorry, I meant GCC's runtime isn't GPL.


No one is arguing that there is a place for the GPL.


How did Adacore kill Ada?




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