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

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

On Friday, April 20, 2018 at 5:27:10 AM UTC-5, Paul Rubin wrote:
> - Finally I think there are realtime problems like bit-banging comms
>   protocols that might have been done with software back in the day, but
>   that now get done with FPGA's (i.e. in VHDL or Verilog) now that
>   FPGA's are cheap, since it's much easier to get deterministic timing
>   with FPGA's than with CPUs.  So a fair number of applications have
>   actually been removed from Ada's problem space.

note the FPGA-instead-of-GPU for FPGAs in datacenters on the Intel Arria 10 GX GPU card:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/13/slicker_server_rackery_and_epyc_gateways

the other big FPGA manufacturer is doing much the same for FPGAs in datacenters:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/xilinx_everest_acap_super_fpga

Embedded realtime systems are going to be going mainstream in data processing with FPGAs in the datacenter.  Ada's traditional marketspace is going to get much bigger very quickly.

Also, we always talk about Ada+SPARK.  Why not Ada+VHDL, which is its syntactic cousin, as a smooth and seamless programming environment for FPGA development:  software and netmask in sibling languages?