Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2014-07-10, Marius Amado-Alves <amado.alves@gmail.com> wrote:
>> My current number one example: implementing OpenSSL in Ada is exactly
>> the kind of thing Ada would be good at. Unfortunately, it's also not
>> practical.
>
> On the contrary, it would be very practical to have AWS working well with SSL... 
> I was never able to do that on Windows.
> AWS is a great lib, but horrible at installing.

A requirement behind rewriting OpenSSL would be to enable it's use in
_all_ the operating systems and platforms which currently use OpenSSL.
If this isn't the case, your replacement is destined to remain a niche
and generally forgotten product. It would also need to be compatible
with OpenSSL's API.

While I focused on OpenSSL in my comments, Ada (as a language) would
also be a good choice for replacing the client side SSL libraries such
as Firefox's use of NSS.

Unfortunately the same issues apply here because unless your SSL client
library replacement can operate in all the same environments as the C
language library it would replace, then it's destined to remain a niche
and forgotten product.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world