Some time ago, I was reading the news and one article stated that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) added Rust to their list of safer languages. I had a look at the list and while I was not sursprised that they have added Rust to the list, I found the other entries in the list quite interesting. There are several entries for tools and modifications that try to make C / C++ safer. Ada ist another entry in the list. I prefer a safe language over tools that try to make a language safer, so I decided to have a look at Ada.

I would like to do Ada programming on Windows and Linux, but let’s start with the Windows setup. I already use Visual Studio Code and WSL for Rust programming and fortunately there’s an Ada extension for VS Code as well. It has a great Tutorial: Using Ada in VS Code. In a nutshell, the following steps are needed.

• Install some packages from the system repository: apt install gnat gprbuild gdb
• Install the Ada extension in VS Code.

The tutorial continues to build the usual hello world example, shows how to run checks on the code and how to debug the program.

As I use WSL on Windows, the setup for Linux will not be that different for me. However, as I use Emacs for development on Linux, I would need an Ada mode for Emacs. Therefore, on Linux, the following steps are needed.

• Install the packages from the system repository: apt install gnat gprbuild gdb
• Install the Ada mode in Emacs.

Now that I have the basic development environment set up on Windows and Linux, I’m looking for a beginner learning resource. I find it a bit hard to get an overview of available resources. Something like the Learn Rust website would be great. Well, I think that I will try the Ada Programming Wikibook first.