[HN Gopher] AdaCore Announces Gnat Pro for Rust
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       AdaCore Announces Gnat Pro for Rust
        
       Author : pjmlp
       Score  : 70 points
       Date   : 2023-09-30 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.adacore.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.adacore.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | codetrotter wrote:
       | Sounds awesome! Too bad that it probably costs 10s of thousands
       | of dollars for a license or more. Judging from the fact that you
       | have to contact sales before they will even tell you :/
        
         | tibbydudeza wrote:
         | I once asked why there was a POA in the Ferrari brochure (not
         | that I could afford one ever).
        
         | Veserv wrote:
         | Is 12 junior dev-days a lot of money for a software development
         | tool? A single junior dev costs 20x as much per year. Is having
         | 5% more junior devs on your team better than better tooling for
         | the other 95% of the team?
         | 
         | I can see how it might be a impediment for tinkering and
         | hobbyists, but it is a pittance for any commercial usage.
        
           | rowanG077 wrote:
           | Where are 12 junior dev days worth more then 20k? Not even in
           | silicon valley salaries are that insane.
           | 
           | Relying on proprietary technology is in itself a pretty large
           | risk regardless of the monetary cost.
        
             | pjmlp wrote:
             | In countries where seniors cost 100+ EUR/$ per hour in
             | project costs.
             | 
             | Do the monthly math for respective FTE costs.
        
               | rowanG077 wrote:
               | How does the cost of a senior factor into it? This is
               | about junior cost.
               | 
               | Besides even at 100+ EUR/$ per hour you don't come close
               | to 20k after 12 days.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | It was to make a measurement point, it comes to 9600,
               | with some typical rounding adjustments as buffer, 10 000.
               | 
               | Which is half of it, although in projects where Oracle
               | licences are rounding errors, I expect much higher rates.
        
               | coryrc wrote:
               | Employee total burden is about double their take-home
               | pay, so 2 x $100 x 8 x 12 is $19200.
        
             | Veserv wrote:
             | I was using 10 K$ as the baseline.
             | 
             | Junior devs make 100-200 K$/yr in salary. The fully
             | burdened cost including overhead and benefits is usually
             | around double that at around 200-300 K$ (higher base
             | compensation usually results in lower proportional
             | overhead). In the US there are ~2000 working hours a year,
             | so that amounts to 100-150 $/hr.
             | 
             | There are 8 hours per dev-day, so 96 dev-hours. At 100-150
             | $/hr that is 9600-14400 $.
             | 
             | If you are really obstinate about 20 K$, then just double
             | it and call it 25 junior-dev days. Whoopie, still only 10%
             | of the yearly cost of a junior-dev. Yeah, developers are
             | really expensive. So back to the original question, just
             | minimally changed to account for irrelevant factors of two.
             | 
             | Do you think having 10% more junior devs on your team is
             | better than having better tooling for the other 90% of the
             | team?
        
               | rowanG077 wrote:
               | Well then you are still looking at silicon valley level
               | of salaries. The top of the top of the world.
               | 
               | Let's take The Netherlands, where I live. A junior dev is
               | expected to make EUR34,422/year. This is still a western
               | country so let's go somewhere else. In China a junior dev
               | makes about Y=269,904 a year, or $1.806,89. Is this tool
               | worth 5+ man years of a junior dev? If your back of the
               | envelope calculations only barely make sense for a tiny
               | part of the world maybe the pricing is actually insane.
               | 
               | edit: Y=269,904 is $37.002. Point still stands.
               | 
               | > Do you think having 10% more junior devs on your team
               | is better than having better tooling for the other 90% of
               | the team?
               | 
               | The tool would have to be pretty damn good. And also not
               | introduce business risk or at the very least a minimal
               | business risk.
        
               | khuey wrote:
               | > In China a junior dev makes about Y=269,904 a year, or
               | $1.806,89. Is this tool worth 5+ man years of a junior
               | dev?
               | 
               | Try doing the currency conversion from Yuan to Dollars
               | and not from Yen to Dollars.
        
           | bsder wrote:
           | I no longer do proprietary licenses when my ass is on the
           | line.
           | 
           | With a proprietary license, you are one set of legal filings
           | away from having the rug pulled out from under you.
           | 
           | See: the Our Machinery fiasco.
           | https://www.rfleury.com/p/ships-icebergs-game-engines
           | 
           | Or perhaps I should have linked to all the gnashing of teeth
           | about Unity
        
             | Agingcoder wrote:
             | I'm not sure about this specific contract, but historically
             | speaking, Adacore has sold support contracts, and even if
             | you stop paying, you're still allowed to use the compiler
             | versions you've paid for. Furthermore, since these
             | compilers are all based on upstream, and all Adacore work
             | eventually ends up upstream, there's essentially no risk
             | you're going to be left stranded.
        
             | Xylakant wrote:
             | You won't get around fees paid in the certified compiler
             | world. If you want someone to sign, stamp and deliver
             | paperwork proving that a compiler upholds a standard and
             | likely also take liability for it, you'll need to pay. Few
             | organizations will take on liability for free.
             | 
             | But you can get pretty close, at least in some spaces.
             | Self-certification is always an option. Aerospace will be
             | harder, automotive is annoying but feasible.
             | 
             | Ferrocene for one is entirely 100% compatible with the
             | equivalent rust compiler, in fact it is the rust compiler
             | built, qualify-tested, packages and delivered without any
             | significant (1) patches. As such, it's entirely feasible to
             | use "I'll just use open source rustc" as an escape hatch.
             | Not a pretty one, self certification is quite a bit of
             | effort, but a bounded one. There's no magic in what we did,
             | most of it is legwork.
             | 
             | We even open sourced the spec that the certification is
             | based on, so you'll have to do less legwork than we did.
             | 
             | This has in fact been a design goal and a requirement of
             | our early customers.
             | 
             | I can't speak to Adacores plans regarding upstream
             | compatibility, I have no insight other than their public
             | statements and they've been silent on that matter.
             | 
             | (1) a few lines, mostly target support for stuff rustc
             | doesn't offer in tree
             | 
             | Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Ferrous.
        
       | cmrdporcupine wrote:
       | So I guess I'm not clear about this -- have they implemented a
       | fresh new compiler that runs on the GNAT toolchain? Or is this a
       | stable/certified fork of the existing Rust LLVM-based toolchain
       | with a GNAT branding overtop of it? Or something inbetween? What
       | about associated tools like Cargo? Rustanalyzer, Rustfmt, etc.?
       | What version of Rust do they currently target? What about 3rd
       | party crates support etc?
       | 
       | FWIW I work professionally in a space which is likely one of
       | their target markets (autonomous/precision agriculture) on a
       | system in Rust (and C++). I skimmed through the pages but didn't
       | find a technical explanation of what they're offering.
        
         | jiehong wrote:
         | > GNAT Pro for Rust is currently in early-access for select
         | customers and provides a compiler (rustc), a build and package
         | manager (cargo), and a debugger (gdb) for x86_64 Linux and
         | Linux cross targets.
        
       | doomrobo wrote:
       | What is GNAT? Is there an example? Code? Screenshots?
        
         | rekado wrote:
         | https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat/
        
       | the_duke wrote:
       | See also the Ferrous Systems announcement about AdaCore leaving
       | their previous Rust partnership :
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37711274
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-30 23:00 UTC)