Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[David Thompson <dave.thompson2@verizon.net>]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2014 16:03:51 -0700 (PDT), sbelmont700@gmail.com wrote:

> On Tuesday, July 8, 2014 1:25:00 PM UTC-4, Shark8 wrote:

> Mostly because in a strongly typed system, *everything* has to be a generic.  
And once you start in with generics, all the little gotchas and quirks
make any sort of modestly-complex component next to impossible (or at
least extremely unpleasant) to create.  So we, as a community, cannot
easily divide up the work in a component like manner, and are usually
forced to start all way down at the O/S interface level *for every
single project*.  And again, even if you do manage to create an
elegant Ada interface to OpenSSL, it's not going to be OpenSSL,
because OpenSSL is an untyped C API that is anathema to everything
Ada.  The better you make it, the further away from the standard you
get, and the less people are going to want to use it.
> 

Huh? Except for application data, which a general-purpose transport
can't know about, OpenSSL goes to quite a bit of effort to make its
API about as strongly typed as can be accomplished in C, with mostly
opaque structs, access routines, shims for ASN.1 and PEM, etc. It's
not perfect, and certainly not as easy as in Ada, but it's far from
the all-too-common-in-C void* madness you suggest.