Hacker News: kevlar700

New comment by kevlar700 in "Overview of the Ada Computer Language Competition (1979)"

kevlar700 — Wed, 21 May 2025 14:49:42 +0000

True but it was far more open than a committee. The STRAWMAN requirements were circulated widely for comment to industry, military, federal and academic communities and to select experts such as Dijkstra and Hoare. Then WOODENMAN circulated for comment after incorporating changes based on STRAWMANS responses.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Overview of the Ada Computer Language Competition (1979)"

kevlar700 — Wed, 21 May 2025 09:26:38 +0000

Interestingly Co-Pilot gets it wrong and states Ada was designed by committees instead of being multiple competitive processes. How misunderstood Ada is.

https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/Jp9AmNHMEJzNmcbiu1VNx

https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/vUjdaDh4mXvj1fm4cyt15

New comment by kevlar700 in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

kevlar700 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 12:14:52 +0000

Loving Ada without using exceptions or inheritance on embedded and desktop. Some love Ada full OOP tagged types. I love Ada procedural style with privacy and abstract data types. I wish Flutter was written in Ada but atleast Dart is better than JavaScript atleast for procedural code without it's oop boiler plate. You don't actually need OOP for widgets.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?” (2022)"

kevlar700 — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:54:05 +0000

There is a podcast and blackhat? video about Nvidia choosing SPARK over Rust. Not because of formal verification at all but because it is a more developed prospect and offers better security even without any formal verification. This isn't mentioned but Ada is also far better at modelling registers or even network packets.

I might consider AI if it utilised SPARKs gnat prove but I wouldn't usw AI otherwise.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?” (2022)"

kevlar700 — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:46:12 +0000

SPARK is free for all to use and is open source. They chose to pay for Adacores pro support services and verified pro Ada compiler over the FSF GCC/Gnat Ada compiler. Spark is actually part of the Gnat compiler (compatibility) but actually the slower analysis is done by gnatprove thereby keeping compilation and iterative development fast. Nvidia can certainly afford to do so of course.

New comment by kevlar700 in "The state of Rust trying to catch up with Ada [video]"

kevlar700 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 13:07:33 +0000

Predicates are great but most of the good stuff including privacy, proper subtyping and abstract data types came with Ada 83. Rust can't hold a candle even to Ada 83 imo.

New comment by kevlar700 in "The state of Rust trying to catch up with Ada [video]"

kevlar700 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 13:03:25 +0000

Hardware products like sensor and control devices. I also use it for desktop tooling whenever a script wants a for loop. Unfortunately I use Flutter for GUI stuff because I hate js and because it has Android/IOS plugins that I would have to write if using Gnoga.

New comment by kevlar700 in "The state of Rust trying to catch up with Ada [video]"

kevlar700 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:06:10 +0000

I think Ada is seen as some esteemed language that only the military and space would have the expertise to use. I had that opinion for maybe a decade but it was very wrong. The other issue was that it is so powerful that compilers had bugs and by the time an affordable open source compiler came along I guess C++ was gaining libraries and the militaries don't release libraries.

The ironic thing is that Ada was designed to be cost effective over a projects lifetime. C costs you a lot further down the line.

New comment by kevlar700 in "The state of Rust trying to catch up with Ada [video]"

kevlar700 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:58:56 +0000

Better to hurt your eyes (which is nonsense unless a book hurts your eyes) than your brain. Optimised for the common operation of reading.

New comment by kevlar700 in "The state of Rust trying to catch up with Ada [video]"

kevlar700 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:56:59 +0000

Whenever I can use Ada. I wouldn't use anything else.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Ada Gems (2014)"

kevlar700 — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:44:46 +0000

I use Ada for embedded products and it's the best language for embedded by far. Despite it's reputation I think it's an easy to use language.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Porting the GNAT Ada compiler to macOS/aarch64"

kevlar700 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 23:49:23 +0000

True though from what he has said early on in it being more of a hobby and liking building tools then I am sure he would welcome any help or input.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole"

kevlar700 — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:56:24 +0000

Spark supports borrowing which is easier to use than Rusts now. It also prevents memory leaks.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole"

kevlar700 — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:54:40 +0000

Agreed. It would also alleviate the maintenance issue as Ada was designed to reduce software costs. Realistically the obly way this will have any chance is if a few developers were funded full time to work on it. There seemed to be a few full time devs pushing Rust support and some drivers before it was taken seriously. Honestly Ada is the best language that I have seen for drivers and for network stacks or for registers received as bytes. Linux is missing out.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole"

kevlar700 — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:46:31 +0000

The real benefit of Adas typing is that it is so easy to utilise often preventing logic errors.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole"

kevlar700 — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:31:35 +0000

Why? The code you compile isn't infected by the runtime license?

New comment by kevlar700 in "A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)"

kevlar700 — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 16:29:12 +0000

Ada is so good for embedded. Loving it.

New comment by kevlar700 in "A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)"

kevlar700 — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 16:28:02 +0000

Interesting. I love Ada and these historical doomed to repeat ourself facts are interesting like Ada books from the 80s talking about AI. Before I switched from Go to Ada I actually used to use var upfront out of preference.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Show HN: Getada: rustup-like installer for Ada's toolchain/package manager"

kevlar700 — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:55:37 +0000

Adas specification was developed competitively over a number of years with embedded development as well as the ability to replace all 450 languages in use by the D.O.D. at the time as requirements. Rusts first official specification is still in the works aside from the one created by AdaCore.

Representation clauses are just beautiful for embedded memory-mapped registers and network protocols and driver registers received over spi/i2c etc.. There is even built-in validity checking. No need to shift generally as the compiler does everything for you.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_Embedded_C_Dev...

The D.O.D study that includes Java would need to be dug up but this one is interesting too.

https://forum.ada-lang.io/t/comparing-the-development-costs-...

I only found out recently that the D.O.D. Ada mandate didn't say you had to use Ada. It said you had to demonstrate why your project would be more cost-effective than using Ada. Considering Ada was designed with cost-effectiveness/maintainability as a primary requirement then that was a difficult task.

New comment by kevlar700 in "Show HN: Getada: rustup-like installer for Ada's toolchain/package manager"

kevlar700 — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:32:38 +0000

I'm not afraid of functional programming. I just dislike it. I avoid recursion in Ada personally (others like it). I think OOP is over rated and the clarity of imperative is under rated. Though I do like how Ada provides object oriented design to imperative programs even without touching Adas OOP features (tagged types).