Re: The future of Ada is at risk

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.tsoh+bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

On Sat, 2007-12-29 at 04:06 +0100, Rico Secada wrote:

> Problems with GNU GNAT and platform independence seems to be the one
> major reason why Ada isn't a moving target.
> 
> I would like your comments on this please!

What variety of unnamed platforms do you mean?
The future of Ada on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD seems at risk.
(It is not at risc on Mac OS X BSD.)
Seriously, by the count of installations, isn't the future of
*BSD at risk. Sadly, this might be one of the reasons why no
one bothers to write a full GNAT runtime for BSD anymore.

What do you mean by variety of platforms? GNAT is running and supported
on every mainstream OS, including Windows NT (with or without .NET),
Mac OS X, Solaris, and GNU/Linux. The number of PC OS users with
a full GNAT option should thus be very close to 100%.

GNAT has been ported to several major non-PC operating systems,
such as VMS, VxWorks, and a few well known workstation Unices.

If a goal is to port major applications to one of the other unnamed
platforms, it might be best to ask those who provide Ada compilers
for that platform.

I'm not sure that inspecting mailing lists etc. for statistics
offers either validity or reliability of data. Depending on who
is to read you paper, they might find it suspicious that you
pool BSD and Linux lists, and then draw conclusions that cannot
be true for both platforms; GNAT (and other compilers) is a fully
supported Ada compiler on GNU/Linux. The data might be good enough
for goal directed marketing statistics, though.

Is your paper aimed at readers in the profession?
(That is, where money is involved?)