Continued discussion of Ada compiler response query.

[schallen@dinl.uucp (Eric Schallenmueller)]

Well folks, thanks for the help on my issue regarding the poor Ada response
at compile time.  The reason I didn't post the info regarding paging and
cpu etc. is because I didn't have it.  The only new info I have is that the
box is a VAX 8800.  That doesn't mean much to me since I'm using a VAXstation
III.  Also they have about ten disks.  I don't know if they are full, fragm-
ented or what, or even if the files are randomly distributed across each one.

From the comments I have been getting, it looks as if the verdict is guilty
on some counts, such as multiple instantiations of generics.  This, I thought
was a feature of Ada which should be heavily utilized, particularly for code
reuse issues.  It appears that this is not the case:  that generics should be
used, but in a limited way.  Am I right in this quickly make conclusion?  I 
hope not.  Seems as if this would defeat the purpose of generics.  

One of the things that many of you asked is:  why are you recompiling the world
every time you do a build?  Part of the reason is that the core of the system
that they are having the most troubles with is used by EVERYONE, and so a 
single change to the core (kernel??) causes a massive recompile.  Although this
is probably a poor design/implementation, it can't really be changed at this 
point in the ballgame.

Regarding the reuse issue.  I read an article by Royce Walker of TRW about 
CCPDS-R where he talked about reusing 120k LOC to produce over 2 million
LOC of machine language instructions.  Am I reading too much into this, or
did they really do that much code reuse with generics and still be able to
have outstanding performance in compile and execution of their system??

This last paragraph seems to contradict my quick conclusion in the immediately
preceeding paragraph.  I think we'd all benefit if someone could straighten me
out on this stuff.

With much gratitude,

Eric