undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnequo3y ago0 comments

What is the reason that safety-critical tools like sudo and OpenSSL are not written in Ada? Rust is still undergoing a lot of work but Ada has been around, has been stable, and it is fast.

Is it that GNAT only became available relatively late in the lifetime of GNU/Linux? Or is there another technical reason for it?

0 comments

pjmlp3y ago

UNIX and C are symbiotic, for a long time, C would be the only compiler in the box, eventually C++ joined the party as they share the same origin.

Anything else required buying the product and justify why the compilers in the box wouldn't do it .

When UNIX SDKs became commercial, it was even worse, you would naturally one buy the main one, not pay twice for programming languages.

Then the UNIX clones also followed the same culture focusing on C for the clones. Early versions of the GNU manifesto explicitly refer that C should be the preferred language.

That is how we landed here.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse