Comment by alok-g
2 months ago
Where does tooling and platform support stand for Ada? Could one develop desktop, mobile, web apps, too using Ada? Thanks.
2 months ago
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/