If anyone is looking for a battle-tested (sometimes literally) production ready, statically and dynamically checked C-like language, take a look at https://ada2012.org!
Ada is in practice almost completely maintained by one single (consulting) company, Adacore, who, except for the GNAT compiler, release all of their OSS contributions under GPLv3 "to limit your freedom [of use/reuse]" (it's mentioned explicitly on their Website).
They do NOT want an autonomous Ada community to pop up, they just want to attract programmers they can contract. Since they're basically the only noteworthy contributors for Ada, they're impossible to bypass, hence using Ada means submitting to Adacore's whims.
Ada is indeed a very well designed language, and with some recent language revisions, so have you ever wondered why it did not get any traction at all? Well, that's why.
Every 6 months or so on HN or Reddit, someone rediscovers Ada, gets psyched and tells everyone ... and then discovers the licensing / controlled ecosystem issues, and walks away. And we don't hear about it. For about 6 months.
> They do NOT want an autonomous Ada community to pop up, they just want to attract programmers they can contract. Since they're basically the only noteworthy contributors for Ada, they're impossible to bypass, hence using Ada means submitting to Adacore's whims.
Disclaimer: I work at AdaCore. Both forces are working in tension in the company: Some people push for the community, some for commercial interests. Of course as a company we want both to coexist, which is the difficult balance to find. The community advocates are getting stronger and trying to push their visions and make it understood. This is a long process but it's making headway. But, anyway, saying that we don't want an autonomous Ada community to pop up is dead wrong.
The libraries we release on GitHub are generally under GPLv3+runtime exception, so you can actually dynamically link against them in code with a different licence. https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatcoll-core for example.
It is very possible, if not ideal, to develop native software in Ada today, with whatever licence you choose.
You are correct, but I was speaking in terms of general-purpose programming, with an OSS/free implementation available, and to my knowledge all the other vendors only target the embedded and high-integrity spaces. And they cost money.
Moreover Adacore is the only one to have a general-purpose OSS (albeit kind of captive) ecosystem.
Your ANSI/ISO remark is off-topic. You don't need a seat there to use the extensive C++ ecosystem. With Adacore it's either GPLv3 all the way or you pay up. Also, to underline their gatekeeper status even more: they could one day decide to stop releasing their compiler to GNAT, without giving any reason, and there's nothing anyone could do about it.
> You don't need a seat there to use the extensive C++ ecosystem.
Thanks to GCC and Sun, and later Apple.
GCC was a toy compiler until Sun decided to start charging for their UNIX development SDK, which made many companies contribute to GCC's development.
Likewise if it wasn't for GPLv3, Apple would probably never bothered to create clang.
> With Adacore it's either GPLv3 all the way or you pay up
Actually I do have issues with people earning money with the work from others for free without contributing anything back.
GPLv3 is quite appealing for free software.
Want to earn money without contributing anything back? Use commercial licensed software.
> Also, to underline their gatekeeper status even more: they could one day decide to stop releasing their compiler to GNAT, without giving any reason, and there's nothing anyone could do about it.
There is always the very latest GPLv3 version, that everyone willing to contribute can carry on using.
> Actually I do have issues with people earning money with the work from others for free without contributing anything back.
With the BSD license, you can fork it all you want, but you have to maintain that fork. For most people/companies the feature is not a competitive advantage. So they donate the code back, and it means they don't have to spend so much time maintaining a fork.
The way I see it is, I'm a working stiff that's used a lot of opensource in the past. I don't mind releasing things as BSD clause to help another working stiff, as long as it doesn't contain my company's "secret sauce."
> Ada is in practice almost completely maintained by one single (consulting) company, Adacore
One would think this is a reason not to inform people of the existence of Ada – but I actually see it the other way around.
With a large enough community, the influence of Adacore would diminish and we would see more independent contributions. Ada has all the right things in place to create a great FOSS community, with an open, published standard, democratic contribution model, GNU support and so on. It's just missing the people to make it truly free.
The problem is that said GNU support (which AFAIK is the one everyone interested in the language uses) is contributed by ... Adacore. They can decide to stop doing that should they wish to do so. I might be out of date, but their Ada compiler is the only one that's up-to-date, targets multiple platforms, and can be used for free. So they have a sort of de facto vendor lock-in.
Also, if you have to recreate a collection of lib from scratch, I have the feeling people would rather contribute to a newer language in the same (or same-ish) space doing just that, such as Rust -- which I think is what is happening, even if Ada still has some distinctive features.
The GNAT compiler suffices for general programming in Ada though, so I'm not sure I understand your objection.
Also, Adacore is not the reason Ada didn't catch on. There were a lot of limitations in the standard library as of Ada95, because Ada focused so much on the embedded space. Because of this, some things that were easy in C/C++ were unnecessarily difficult in Ada.
Frankly, I think Rust achieves better ergonomics without Ada's verbosity, but Ada still has some great features that I wish were in other languages, like ranges.
I really want Ada to get its fair share of attention. It's an impressively well thought out language. It's like a team of academics and industry pros took a long hard at C and C++ and then made something to fit the the same niche (high performance, real time, and very important software), but made it almost impossible to write incorrect code.
The Ada 95 Rationale does reference C and C++ ("Ada 95 incorporates the benefits of Object Oriented languages without incurring the pervasive overheads of languages such as SmallTalk or the insecurity brought by the weak C foundation in the case of C++" - http://www.adahome.com/LRM/95/Rationale/rat95html/rat95-p1-2... ) but as you can see, it also refers to Smalltalk. The references include Modula (though not Modula-2) and Wirth's paper on "Type Extensions".
It comes across like they drew much more from languages other than C and C++, and were in the niche of "high performance, real time, and very important software", but from a different path than C/C++.
Sure, it's obvious it wasn't based on C/C++, but these days, among the most popular languages, it plays in the same sandbox. I'm sure if you'd run an unsupervised clustering over the Wikipedia pages for various programming languages, you'd get Ada in the same cluster as C, C++, Rust, D, and maybe Go.
...actually, this is something I'd really like to do if I had more time...
You say it's obvious, and I agree. But I want to know why kqr called it a "C-like language" and why inamberclad said it comes from "a team of academics and industry pros [who] took a long hard at C and C++ and then made something to fit the the same niche."
Those seem to be ahistorical comments.
It's no surprise that languages used in embedded and real-time systems would cluster together. But that doesn't reveal intent and influence.
There's a free compiler called Gnat, but the community is still rather small. I think it's something of a catch-22. Most of the resources you'll find on the internet are old (mid-90s) blogs and educational sites.
>>> fit the the same niche (high performance, real time, and very important software
I don't see any community emerging from the web any time soon :-) To me this niche means "avionics, military, nuclear, medical, spatial". Not your week-end project.
They used to be, using "scripting" languages as general purpose is relatively recent development. Up until the early 2000 few people would have considered writing anything remotely CPU-intensive in Perl or Javascript. For instance I first started coding in C in high school because I wanted to write games for my calculator and the BASIC interpreter was too slow. I don't think there was an Ada compiler targeting my calculator, but there sure was a gcc port.
C's history is tightly coupled with that of Unix, it's always been rather open and "hacker-friendly".
> C's history is tightly coupled with that of Unix, it's always been rather open and "hacker-friendly".
I'm not sure I agree. Sure, it's reasonably easy to write your own implementation of something that closely resembles C, but C is also infamously dependent on implementation specifics and it, last I checked, had a paywalled standard. That's the opposite of open and hacker-friendly.
The primary reason C feels open is, I suspect, precisely its Unix coupling. If you want to read the sources to your Unix-like OS, you're likely to find sources written in C. You'll also find system libraries with C calling conventions. If you crack open your OS, you find C. It's easy to see the connection between "open", "hacker-friendly" and "C" – but the connection is between your OS and your knowledge of C – not C itself.
>You'll also find system libraries with C calling conventions. If you crack open your OS, you find C. It's easy to see the connection between "open", "hacker-friendly" and "C" – but the connection is between your OS and your knowledge of C – not C itself.
You're right (and it's a bummer that the C standard is behind a paywall) but don't you think that having a large open ecosystem is more important and significant than having an open technical standard, especially when several high quality open source compiler implementations already exist? Having an open standard won't do you much good if all the tooling and libraries are closed source.
I'm not affiliated, so not much I can do there. But it did pique my interest: I get the warning on my desktop computer but not on my laptop nor my phone. All three are running a recent version of Firefox. No idea why that is.
Edit: Silly me. I know why. I visited the HTTP version of the site on those two devices...
