Comment by ajdude
2 months ago
I almost exclusively work in Ada for my hobby projects these days; It's great for doing both high level and low level programming.
2 months ago
I almost exclusively work in Ada for my hobby projects these days; It's great for doing both high level and low level programming.
Where does tooling and platform support stand for Ada? Could one develop desktop, mobile, web apps, too using Ada? Thanks.
Tooling is pretty good; Ada has a package manager similar to Cargo (Alice: https://alire.ada.dev ), and you can install it pretty easily via GetAda ( https://getada.dev ), which brings in the compilers and any libraries you'd need. (disclaimer: I'm the author of GetAda)
Desktop apps: definitely. There's bindings for various UI toolkits like GTK and I know of a few people working on games in Ada, usually thick bindings like SDL: https://github.com/ada-game-framework and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn3eTxaOtL2Oxl9HbNOhI... There's also Gnoga, which is similar to Electron for writing UI apps: https://github.com/Blady-Com/gnoga
A bunch of libraries for various drivers or other useful things on https://alire.ada.dev/crates.html (to include something like "ada_gui" in your ada project, you would just use alire, e.g. `alr with ada_gui`).
Much of Ada's webapp functionality is either interfacing with the Ada Web Server or gnoga (I've written a few servers using Ada Web Server, including one for an ".io" game).
There's an LLVM compiler which in theory can produce wasm but I've not messed with it: https://github.com/AdaCore/gnat-llvm
Mobile platforms can be targetted and cross-compiled in Alire, but I'm not sure who's doing it right now.
For anyone interested, I definitely recommend checking out some of the presentations of Ada's recent FOSDEM dev room https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/ada/
Are there Ada jobs?
Your favourite job board will have a tag for Ada. There are jobs out there. Some in lower level things like finance, reliability testing, embedded software. Some in higher level things like gaming, AI, web services.
There are fewer, and they do tend to be more demanding, but they certainly exist.
Huntsville Alabama has some