Dear Editor,
In the Fall 2006 Military Embedded Systems article The COTS software market doesn’t run on DOD time, you wrote that “One only has to look at defunct languages such as Forth or the barely commercially viable Ada environment to understand that the military has little or no clout with the COTS software industry.”
We at AdaCore respectfully disagree with the statement that Ada is “barely commercially viable.”
AdaCore, whose sole business is the support of the Ada programming language and Ada programmers, has shown steady growth and profitability since its inception in 1994 with an average growth rate of nearly 30 percent per year, and an impressive list of Ada programming customers. Not only has our support for legacy, current, and future Ada development needs (Ada83, Ada95, and the new Ada2005) built a successful business model for AdaCore, but use of the Ada language itself has continued to grow in those areas where the language provides its greatest benefits. This is most notably the safety- and security-critical software marketplace where Ada’s strong typing, compile time error checking, runtime checks, and built-in exception handling, among other features, allow for the development of systems that are more reliable and thus more readily meet safety and security requirements. In today’s safety- and security-conscious world, we feel this market will only continue to grow.
Another tangible indicator of Ada’s viability is the success AdaCore’s GNAT Academic Program (GAP). Dedicated to building a community of academic Ada professionals, GAP grew to more than 100 institutional members less than a year after the initiative was launched. Through GAP, new Ada programmers are being trained and launched into the marketplace.
The Ada market is healthy: According to an industry survey sponsored by the Ada Resource Association (ARA), the total costs of systems in which Ada plays a critical part is at least $5.6 billion in Europe and North America. The ARA, an international nonprofit organization, maintains the Ada Information Clearinghouse and comprises principal suppliers of Ada development environments and tools: AdaCore, IBM Rational Software, Praxis Critical Systems, and SofCheck.
The full report is posted on the ARA website at:
http://www.adaic.com/news/survey-results.html
Interestingly enough, AdaCore’s supported product lines very much follow the model presented in the follow-on article titled: The emerging practice of software product line development. AdaCore develops and supports Ada compile systems. These must be planned from the start to support a variety of host platforms, then both native and cross-embedded targets. The product lines are developed with reusable and portable front-end components. These are designed to be easily ported to the multitude of native host platforms we support. Target-specific native or embedded components or back-ends are then plugged into this front-end technology to provide technologies such as target-specific code generation. This is perhaps a simplified description of our software development model, but one shared by many vendors that support compile systems. We fully agree with the author’s conclusion on the advantages of this approach.
Sincerely,
Greg Gicca
AdaCore
Director of Safety and Security Product Marketing
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