The Ada programming language has been experiencing some kind of renaissance and the frequency of Ada stories has been increasing over the past few years. I think it makes sense to create a tag for this language, both for people who’d like to ignore it and for those who’d like to never miss a story about it.
The tag would cover both the Ada programming language and its formally proven subset Spark.
Here are a few stories that would deserve this tag (I only searched for the obvious “Ada”, “Spark” and “GNAT” keywords, there might be more that I missed):
- Ada in 2021 Overview
- On the benefits of Families… (Entry Families)
- Going all-in with Ada: a manifesto
- Giving Ada a chance
- Performance analysis and tuning of SPARKNaCl
- HAC Ada Compiler
- Finding Vulnerabilities using Advanced Fuzz testing and AFLplusplus v3.0
- Ada GNAT Ecosystem Community Survey
- M2OS: RTOS with simple tasking support for small microcontrollers
- Relaxing the Data Initialization Policy of SPARK
- CuBit: A General-Purpose Operating System in SPARK/Ada
- Ironsides - DNS server made with Ada SPARK
- Using GNAT-LLVM to target Ada to WebAssembly
- Why Ada Is The Language You Want To Be Programming Your Systems With
- Learning Ada
- FOSDEM 2019 - Proof of Pointer Programs with Ownership in SPARK
I agree that Ada is very much benefiting from the recent new interest in systems programming. A tag sounds reasonable.
This is fantastic point, thanks for making it. My personal impression has been exactly this, and it’s identifiable as such now that you’ve articulated it with clarity. Hopefully the heritage of Ada will continue to have a positive influence even as Ada itself continues to grow and thrive.
In what sense is it “recent”? But yes, a tag would be good.
There’s a new wave of systems programming languages in the last 5-10 years: go as a starter, but then Swift, Rust, nim, zig and such, all serious contenders in that space. Before that, systems programming was the thing you do if you must for a while, now, it’s becoming a much stronger thing.
Before that happened, there was no way past C or C++, but now there’s a space where people actually consider switching away from those. I know of at least one place where that evaluation was actually “Ada vs. Rust” and that speaks to how Ada doing well in that situation.
Essentially: Rust makes people remember Ada.
I have a few articles in the pipe for Ada right now, I’d appreciate people being able to filter me out if they’re not interested.
I look forward to reading these articles! :)
I would like to see an Ada tag, personally.
I definitely support this proposal! Even though Ada is not that well known, it makes up huge parts of our infrastructure and I’d love to see more about it. I can imagine that some people are just a bit hesitant to post stories given there’s no tag that adequately categorizes Ada right now.
Gimme power to filter them all out! I support this new tag!
Yes please! I also was under the impression that I was seeing more Ada related content emerging lately.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but I like your effort :)
Another story for which I could have used the Ada tag.
Actually, I keep forgetting we don’t have it and it surprises me every time. Ada stories are quite common on Lobsters, it’s time to give ourselves the associated tag.
I think @pushcx is very busy and might not have time to work on “new features” - but hopefully with the new mod team things will improve!
Thank you for mentioning that! I didn’t meant that I needed it urgently, just that I was in favor of it. Sorry :-)
Is there anything like ‘Ada renaissance’? I know Google Trends isn’t the ultimate indicator for anything, but it’s sometimes useful, and it doesn’t show any increased interest in Ada:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F0n6y
I think the rise of Rust and the recent direction of C++1x for safe systems programming has reminded people of Ada’s existence. AdaCore seems to be far more aggressive than they were before, and Ada’s image (from the “lol verbose defense contractor language” C programmers called it) has been rehabilitated.
According to TIOBE, the number of job posting for Ada is growing. According to PYPL, there is a growing number of search for Ada tutorials. According to subredditstats, growth of the Ada subreddit has been accelerating.
On a personal level, I’m seeing more and more articles about Ada on news aggregators like Lobste.rs, HackerNews and Reddit. I think @skade got it right and Ada is benefiting a lot from the renewed interest in systems programming that Rust instigated.