Hey !
Another survey on the developer ecosystem, by JetBrains team.
Ada is shown in the survey, do not hesitate to fill it!
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How long is that survey (roughly: pages, time) ?
Are the questions interesting ?
The survey during something like 30 minutes.
There is multiples questions about the use of the language, the activity sector, the use of AI in the dev workflow, etc.
I found it rather interesting.
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This one had less questions about AI, at least it was for me.
You can say you use Ada, but not that you plan to migrate to Ada 
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Probably the best IDE I’ve ever used. I wish gnatstudio (or even VS code) could have that level of usage when you browse large Ada code base or have to do some refactoring. I wish they could support Ada at the same level as Java. If they do, the Ada development will be a lot easier.
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Right 
But you can say that you plan to use Ada in the future 
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It would be interesting to know more in detail what features you would like to be added to GNAT Studio.
On my side, multiline edition would be already nice (would possibly require an upgrade of the editor widget).
And fixes to some of the issues: https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatstudio/issues
But seeing the backlog we need to be patient…
There are a lot of details to make gnatstudio at the same level (there have been a great progress on gnatstudio these last years!), most of them are usability details:
- code navigation: with Intellij you can navigate easily and smoothly from one function to another so that you can traverse forward and backward complex call graphs and see easily their implementation. With gnatstudio this works more or less but it’s painless and at some point you never go back to where you were (when it happens I fall at top of the file which is useless).
- searching text: gnatstudio opens a dialog box (as new window) which makes the operation not immediate and gives a weird behavior. On that matter, Visual Code and Intellij are far better.
- code completion: the code completion almost pops too many times at the wrong moment. It’s a difficult issue to solve I guess because such code completion is important. With Intellij, the code completion appears when I need it, without me having to tell that I need it.
- documentation tooltip: Intellij shows a small tooltip to display a function signature so that you can see the parameter types and return type. This is useful when you look at a function call without having to change context. It’s useful when you have a compilation error to know what argument is missing or which parameter has a wrong type.
- parameter replacement: when you want to change a function/procedure parameter name, you have a popup with gnatstudio and you pray to have a correct result. With Intellij, you just edit your parameter name in-place and it changes everywhere so that you can backtrack, change the new name until you are satisfied and validate the change.
- and there are others that I don’t remember right now…
In terms of missing feature, the ability to rename easily any entity including an Ada package would be very useful (each time I try that, it almost never work).
Intellij has a very powerful refactoring system where you can:
- move an inner class, enum, function to another level (it tells you if there are scope and visibility issues),
- changing signature of a function and it updates calls to that function (add, remove parameter, change return type),
- extract code block to a function,
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Some keyboard shortcuts (for the tasks mentioned above) present in IntelliJ, would be a really nice addition to Gnat Studio. Ctrl+Tab navigation specifically is incredibly helpful (well, at least to me) but also things like Ctrl+Alt+L which auto-formats the current source file.
Also, similar features for VCS integration would come in quite handy (like resolving conflicts etc).
But it is a free tool and it does its job well so..
I don’t use intellij, but GNAT Studio allows you to set keyboard shortcuts for those features and does have VCS integration (at least it does for GIT, I haven’t tried SVN)
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