aida_2012 VS trendy_terminal

Some years ago I wrote a JSON parser, see for example https://github.com/joakim-strandberg/aida_2012/blob/master/src/tests/aida-json_dom_parser_tests.adb. I've been thinking of refactoring but never gotten around to do it. One of the ideas for writing the code was minimizing external dependencies. The JSON parser is written in SPARK and at the time 2018 when the code was written SPARK did not allow heap allocations which means all the data-structures used are statically allocated. I can imagine onox json-ada has a nicer API.

For getting UTF-8 support one can also use Dmitry Kazakovs Simple components (http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de/ada/components). Based on it have made a UTF-8 version which is Ada/Spark based (https://github.com/joakim-strandberg/aida_2012). Another one I have been toying with is cross-compiler: https://github.com/joakim-strandberg/portable_ada . To print to standard out using UTF-8 the easiest way is probably enabling "-gnatW8" in order for normal String types be interpreted as UTF-8 strings. Using the UTF-8 support in the links I would recommend making one's own Ada bindings to the OS. It should be easy to do on Mac OS X and Linux where UTF-8 is enabled by default but more of an issue on Windows where the UTF-8 encoded strings need to be converted to UTF-16 before being handed over to the OS.

The typical way that I've seen is to use the build system to change out body implementations for the platform being compiled. This is modeled after the traditional notion of treating translation units like "modules" in C and C++. When I wrote Trendy Terminal, that's the route that I took. This route avoids virtual function call (dynamic dispatch) overhead.

I also did a few things: - Wrote an online e-book about Ada - Septum - context-based source code search for multi-million line codebases (I use this nearly every day at work. It's being submitted as my Ada crate of the year. - dir_iterators - library similar to the incredible walkdir. - project_indicators - library for spinners and progress bars. - trendy_terminal - library for cross-platform terminal setup, VT100 support, and GNU readline-like behavior. - trendy_test - library for simple unit testing, which runs tests in parallel. - Ada Ray Tracer - an Ada port of Ray Tracing in One Weekend. - dirs_to_graphviz - Make graphviz files from directory trees. - rst_tables - a tool to draw RST table outlines.

It does, it's not enabled by default and you can check your code page with chcp. Trendy Terminal 0.0.1 handles this for you, I should be soon releasing a 0.0.2 version of Trendy Terminal which uses an RAII type to ensure this gets reset properly for you. I'd highly recommend using "Windows Terminal" over the plain Powershell or Command Prompt.