Franco Gasperoni / ENST and Ada Core Technologies
 
 
 

Smaller, cheaper, faster, more widespread is what we have become accustomed to in the playground of computing over the last fifty years. The rise of the mainframe in a company's floor was shadowed by the growth of the minicomputer in a department's room, itself overtaken by workstations and personal computers mushrooming on every employee's desk.

With the emergence of a ubiquitous network along with powerful and inexpensive 32-bit processing, the next revolution may well be computing embedded in a person's living-room, car, wallet, ...

Will the presently segmented market of embedded processing be overtaken by caffeine-ridden technologies or will a draft from an open window blow it towards PC computing?

Whatever its fate, applications in this forthcoming embedded arena will be large and will require real-time processing, something Ada is well equipped to tackle successfully. After having emerged as a key technology for safety critical systems, will the Ada marketplace be able to capitalize on its real-time and software-engineering strengths to establish Ada as a significant technology in the next wave of computing hype?

Franco Gasperoni is one of the founders of ACT-Europe, the European GNAT company and a professor of Computer Sciences at the ENST in Paris. He is one of the main architects of the GNAT-to-Java effort currently underway. His teaching experience encompasses courses on compiler design, programming languages (Ada, C, C++, Java), computer architecture and operating systems.