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

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2018 at 10:01:31 PM UTC-6, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> 
> 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's truly sad is that many APIs would do a *lot* better as Ada than as C or C++, simply because of the addition of aspects and pre/post-conditions. (With the addition of static/disjoint subtypes [see below] following close behind.)

Type Example_Enumeration is ( Steve, Dave, Mary, Alice, Marco, Diana );
Subtype Man is Example_Enumeration
  with Static_Predicate => Men in Steve | Dave | Marco;

Procedure Shave_API( Someone : Man );
-- Or whatever, the point is we can *EASILY* model something like OpenGL's
-- massive list of enumerations, with functions that accept limited subsets.

> 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—

This is true, but I'm not sure how to address the problem. A lot of it has to do with the limited amount of resources we have to develop Ada, due to our small size, which remains small in part due to the above problem.

Perhaps 95% of "what's holding us back" is the combination of the above [usually expressed as "lack of libraries"] and the compiler/tooling situation.