Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2018 at 4:03:52 PM UTC-5, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 18 April 2018 15:31:26 UTC+1, Dan'l Miller  wrote:
> >> I think that the real problem with AdaCore is the lack of sub-$1000
> >> non-GPL annual license for mass-market operating systems on
> >> mass-market ISAs, such as Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.
> 
> Janus/Ada and some versions of ObjectAda are or were in that range, but 
> have not, I believe, sold in "mass-market" numbers.

Some were toy compilers that accompanied books on Ada.  Others thought that the following Ada spec was “supporting” Ada on Windows:  forcing Ada to look verbatim like C for Win32.  Not just any old C conventions & idioms, but Microsoft's really obnoxious C conventions & idioms of that era.

https://unzip-ada.sourceforge.io/za_html/win32__ads.htm

No, supporting Ada on Windows (UWP and WPF), Android SDK, iOS CocoaTouch, and MacOS Cocoa mass-market OSes/frameworks/ISAs would look a lot more like RemObjects in doing via their Elements Compiler confederation for Swift on Windows, Swift on Android, Java on iOS, Java on Windows, C# on Android JVM, C# on processor-native machine code on Android, C# on processor-native machine code on Windows, C# on processor-native machine code on iOS & on MacOS and the corresponding mass-market ISAs.  (And gee, what a shame that RemObjects came from the Borland/Embarcadero ObjectPascal heritage instead from the Ada heritage; it would have been quite nice to see Ada in the Elements Compiler confederation instead of or in addition to ObjectPascal.)

https://docs.ElementsCompiler.com

The gargantuan (extraordinarily-useful) object model below is what supporting Microsoft Windows 10 looks like nowadays, such as supported by not only Microsoft toolchain & languages, but also by RemObjects' {Swift, Java, ObjectPascal}, and increasingly the new Ada-WinRT and WinRT-Rust.  But any Ada compilers that “support” Microsoft OSes out of the box are stuck in the Win32 era not much different than as shown in that cruel Ada spec above.  What is especially sad is that Microsoft has gone to great lengths over the past 1.5 decades to make this rich object library language agnostic, designed for language projections to feel native in each language—which has worked out especially well for C#, F# (a sibling of OCaml), Visual Basic, and the emerging C++/WinRT, Ada-WinRT, and WinRT-Rust (but which didn't work out nearly so well for the grafted-on foreign-feeling /CX and /CLI “divided by” sublanguages in C++/CX and C++/CLI, hence why C++/WinRT is on a juggernaut to replace /CX and /CLI as we speak).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api

Android SDK, iOS CocoaTouch, and MacOS Cocoa of course each have their own analogous rich object model that Ada is shut out of currently and for the foreseeable future.   “Batteries included” is not the mantra of any Ada compiler for targeting Windows 10 UWP, Windows 10 WPF, Android SDK, iOS CocoaTouch, or MacOS Cocoa.  Until Ada-WinRT came along in recent days, Ada compiler vendors at most provided a thin wrapper around the deprecated Win32; no sane person would pay $1000 per year for •that•.