Ada is not a a commercial language. It's free, and the standard is free as well.
Adacore's support is excellent - you're talking directly to gcc/gdb devs. There is no intermediate layer. I've hit a number of nasty technical issues ( compiler bugs mostly), usually fixed within 48h. They then provide you with what they call a 'wavefront' which is essentially a patched version of the compiler which is supported as well.
It is true that the ada community is small, but there is no real other contender in that space ( embedded, formal verification, qualified toolchains, etc).
Edit: nvidia uses spark/ada (from adacore), it's not clear to me what other options they might have given what they want to do (video presentation in the link)
And to be clear they also support C on GCC, so our gcc bugs go there too. Also very very happy with AdaCore's tech support. Response within the day, help and patience in reproducing problems, and almost always with a quick workaround. Often citing the reference manual. You also often have an expert jumping in to help, or to answer a question, or to implement some optimization :-)
I still have fond memories of (the sadly late) Robert Dewar answering a ticket of mine 'this is so slow, whyyyyyyy?' with a 'we have implemented a change that should improve the performance of your code' so fast I hadn't had the time to go talk to our local Ada guy for an alternative idea.
They also have world experts in formal methods like Yannick Moy and Claire Dross who will help you prove you jump-start a Spark project and are pushing the state of the art every year (proof of floating point code, pointer/ownership...).
Money well spent.
And to be clear: not from AdaCore, just a customer.
Comments
Ada is not a a commercial language. It's free, and the standard is free as well.
Adacore's support is excellent - you're talking directly to gcc/gdb devs. There is no intermediate layer. I've hit a number of nasty technical issues ( compiler bugs mostly), usually fixed within 48h. They then provide you with what they call a 'wavefront' which is essentially a patched version of the compiler which is supported as well.
It is true that the ada community is small, but there is no real other contender in that space ( embedded, formal verification, qualified toolchains, etc).
Edit: nvidia uses spark/ada (from adacore), it's not clear to me what other options they might have given what they want to do (video presentation in the link)
"AdaCore + NVIDIA Partnership | AdaCore" https://www.adacore.com/company/partners/nvidia
And to be clear they also support C on GCC, so our gcc bugs go there too. Also very very happy with AdaCore's tech support. Response within the day, help and patience in reproducing problems, and almost always with a quick workaround. Often citing the reference manual. You also often have an expert jumping in to help, or to answer a question, or to implement some optimization :-)
I still have fond memories of (the sadly late) Robert Dewar answering a ticket of mine 'this is so slow, whyyyyyyy?' with a 'we have implemented a change that should improve the performance of your code' so fast I hadn't had the time to go talk to our local Ada guy for an alternative idea.
They also have world experts in formal methods like Yannick Moy and Claire Dross who will help you prove you jump-start a Spark project and are pushing the state of the art every year (proof of floating point code, pointer/ownership...).
Money well spent.
And to be clear: not from AdaCore, just a customer.