Ada 2012 redux

Jack Ganssle

January 14, 2013

Jack Ganssle

One common complaint whenever anyone takes a swipe at a sacred cow like C is "good craftsmen shouldn't blame their tools." Should they?

There's a reason why a craftsmen uses a hammer over a stone, or why developers chose C over assembly language. However, blaming the success or failure of a project on its language is always a mistake: it's a combination of the development environment and people's competence. What matters most is to select a tool that's fit for the task at the beginning and make the best use of it as possible. Using C doesn't make the task of writing reliable code impossible, nor will it inevitably produce a failure, but there are many reasons why choosing Ada development tools are likely to reduce costs and produce a better outcome.

What trends do you see in the adoption of Ada? One recent article on embedded.com ("Unexpected trends") pegs Ada use at around 4% of the embedded space. Is that changing?

First of all, we need to agree on what "embedded space" means. Are we talking about mobile devices? Embedded software on an aircraft? Temperature control programs running on my heating system?

With regards to embedded development, Ada makes the most sense when some reliability aspects need to be taken into account. That's the only market that's really worth looking at. For example, although I'm strongly committed to the language, I wouldn't use it for a commercial phone application.

So to answer to your question, taking into account the general embedded market, I would expect numbers to look a bit smaller for Ada, and a lot smaller for C or C++, when compared to languages such as Java and Objective C. But that reflects a market change within the embedded space more than anything else--embedded development on mobile platforms such as iOS or Android has exploded over the past few years. This doesn't mean Ada usage has fundamentally changed.

Indeed, if you concentrate on the reliable software niche, what we're seeing from our (admittedly biased) vendor point of view is an increase in interest and usage of the language, sometimes in areas where we wouldn't have thought it would have been used previously. It also appears there's increasing attention being given to concerns such as certification or formal proof, where Ada provide notable advantages over C. This is probably one of the reasons that explain this increase of interest.

On fascinating comment was "Add Coverity, add KLEE, add Test Driven Development, add valgrind, add all the other checking tools and it becomes harder to make the errors that people blame C for." Do you think these extra tools Ada-ize C?

That's the counterpart of "good craftsmen shouldn't blame their tools", isn't it ;-)?

These tools do add useful verification to C, and they do improve C code reliability. But they don't really Ada-ize C--as a matter of fact, you will need similar set of tools for Ada as well. That's the development environment I was talking about.

The real question is, with these tools, what level of reliability are you achieving? If buying a complex C static analysis tool merely brings you to the level of a standard Ada compiler, why bother? And yet, if you have the funds to buy that static analysis tool, why not buy an Ada one, and reach an order of magnitude higher standards?