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From: Benjamin Ketcham <bketcham@drizzle.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Embedded Keynote Speaker Mentions Ada
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 01:07:03 -0000
Organization: Ye 'Ol Disorganized NNTPCache groupie
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Date: 2004-09-21T01:07:03+00:00
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Cesar Rabak <crabak@acm.org> wrote:
> 
> Even in a non commercial arena, why can't we convince Open Source
> enthusiats to write the system software in Ada and start to make a
> difference in this realm (my perception of their account on bugs is that
> they have a better response time, not intrinsical better designed in
> security)?

Well, this is a very good point.  I would suggest that a way to
make Ada much more popular, would be to recode the Linux kernel
in Ada.  Perhaps a group of Ada enthusiasts could maintain a port
to Ada of the latest "stable" kernel.  My guess is that this would
gain interest from security- and reliability-minded markets, and
thus would, in turn, increase the demand for Ada programmers to
maintain the "high-reliability Ada version of Linux".

How long does someone who actually knows Ada (not me) think it
would take to translate the kernel to Ada?  Any snags or issues
other than just some time & effort?  Any reason it couldn't be
done?  Or *shouldn't*?  Or has it been tried?  Would the
performance just be too embarrassing in comparison to C?  Is the
Linux kernel thought to already be so secure & bug-free that no
benefits would accrue?

--Benjamin