Make it Simple: A Tale about Robert Dewar (2015)

My story involves Robert Dewar, who in the early 1990s was trying to implement a compiler for the Ada programming language. Not just any compiler - he wanted to create a compiler that could be freely used, shared, and modified. Instead of building an entire compiler from scratch, Robert Dewar decided to build on an existing good compiler: gcc. The GNAT compiler that Dewar co-developed, unlike previous Ada compilers, simply read source files and generated a single object file. Dewar personally told me that when implementing the GNAT compiler, whenever they looked at the language specification and thought it might be complicated to implement, they assumed they didn't understand the language specification and looked for a simpler way to do it. Dewar went on to found the AdaCore, a company that over 20 years later still sells service and support for the Ada compiler and related tools that are Free/Libre/Open Source Software. Even today, the current version of the compiler he helped write produces faster code than many other compilers.