I’ve always been interested in Ada. Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to work on a project that required me to use it. But from studying it over the years, I can immediately appreciate it’s strong type system, inherent support for multi-tasking, and focus on helping the programmer write quality systems. I can think of many projects that would benefit from Ada, especially in the safety critical embedded systems arena.

As part of my vision for the CDT (or dream, I guess) has always been to support multiple programming languages and Ada was one I wanted to see. But with a lot of ideas I have for the CDT, I neither had the time or real community support for it. So when Tom Grosman from Aonix approached me proposing they contribute their ADT code to Eclipse, I jumped at the chance to help.

And I’m glad I did. The Hibachi project is the result of Tom’s work and is nearing it’s creation review. I have been trilled at how Tom had gone about talking to his competitors and other vendors and interested parties and built up a strong community, even before it got started. They have a firm plan that immediately focuses on meeting objectives that would enable all vendors to get value out of Hibachi. This will then promote additional contributions to make Hibachi the best Ada IDE in the business. I can’t wait to see them in action.

There are a lot of things at play here that is a trend I’ve seen with successful Eclipse projects. In many ways the forces are there to make it happen. Customers are demanding high quality IDEs based on Eclipse, the free community would love to see Eclipse support for their favorite tools, vendors would love to provide it all but to do a good job of it, they really need to work together and share the burden. If you can harness all this energy and make your project a friendly place to participate, then I think you have the clear formula for success.