Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System

Re:Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned A... by mjw1007 on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @03:17AM (#24490302)

In the 80s, largely because compilers were expensive.

I think it had a (smallish) second chance in 2001, when GNAT was put in the main GCC tree. By then plenty of people were disillusioned with C and C++, and I think it could have got momentum in a way similar to how Rust has (by appealing to programmers' pride in producing less-buggy programs).

But the Gnu Ada maintainer was also the person running Ada Core technologies (who sold the proprietary version of Gnat), and wasn't at all interested in making sure the free version worked out of the box on Linux distributions, or promoting Ada as a language for writing free software.

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Re:Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned A... by Someone on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @02:31PM (#24495786)

Compilers also were relatively large, at least in part because the language is large. For example, it has generics, tasks and inter-task communication. C compilers did not need to have those in the 80s. That mattered at a time when many users wouldn’t have a hard disk.

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Re:Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned A... by jacobush on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @09:11AM (#24492345)

Yes, I remember a tiny buzz around 2001 for it. I considered it but I couldn't find much information and then Python distracted me for a decade.

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