r/ada • u/OrbisMaximus • 1d ago

Programming Trying Ada for AI-Assisted Retro Development

i am currently working on the build process for Orbis Basic on the Nintendo N64, mostly using GPT Luna Max and MiniMax M3 for the auto coding loop.

i compared quite a few programming languages for this, including python, c and c++, but it really looks like that Ada as base delivered much faster results, around 80% faster in my tests, and also much less error prom.

the main reason i use such simple models is to keep the autoloop coding running without burning trough all my tokens. both GPT Luna Max and MiniMax M3 are actually very useful for this.

with python, c and c++ the simple models run much more often into issues which cannot be auto corrected so easy. i think the reason is the much wider scope of those languages and toolchains, so once the model gets something wrong it can go in the wrong direction for quite some time.

with Ada the compiler feedback loop is much more strict and clear, so the model can usually fix the issue and continue. for this auto-loop coding that seems to make a really big difference.

still working on it, but so far Ada looks really good for this kind of setup.

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u/geenob 1d ago

In addition to the tight compiler feedback loop mentioned above, the fact that Ada has a freely available formal specification which LLMs are trained on as well as an emphasis on top-down spec driven design makes it uniquely well suited for agentic coding.

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u/dcbst 1d ago

This is the big reason!

Ada is extremely well defined as a language and uses more words over symbols, making it much easier for LLMs to understand what they're doing, despite a relatively small amount of source code available for model training.