Re: can one make a static build Ada+GUI GTK application?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:37:48 PM UTC-6, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
> 
> I know I'm "bad" in this aspect: I don't trust much code (even some that I 
> wrote myself), especially if it is not in Ada and do so only out of 
> necessity (I don't have time to write display drivers or a network stack --  
> but I much preferred programming on MS-DOS, which did virtually nothing for 
> you, to the current systems with tons of cruft that often doesn't work as 
> advertised.)
[snip]
> 
> Moral: the best dependence is *no* dependence. It's not always practical to 
> do that, but the less dependence you have the better.

This is true; as you point out it is one of the nicer things about being on a [MS-]DOS system: there are/were [in general] no higher-level dependencies. This meant that an "install" could be as simple as the COPY command, or if you were really adventurous a decompressor + setting "system variables."

The above is also why, IMO, MS-DOS would be a superior platform for the development of some new OS -- there aren't any considerations that need to be taken (i.e. memory managers) that are external to the program itself (rather than having to work around the idiosyncrasies of your host-OS) -- In fact this is how I had the beginnings of an OS that I was writing in TP7 (it could recognize commands, including EXIT, and change the video-mode)... and it was completely runnable as an MS-DOS program in addition to being runnable via bootloader.

All that said, I think a good install-system/dependency-manager could be a good thing for an OS, and we already have some good handling of the latter portion [dependencies] in our compiler-technologies for Ada -- so I don't see why we couldn't leverage that a bit in some hypothetical Ada-OS. (The Rational 1000 http://www.somethinkodd.com/oddthinking/category/geek/software-development/rat1000/ seems interesting from what's mentioned.) The 'registry' idea in MS isn't necessarily a bad one, but throwing everything into it certainly isn't a good idea -- a DB (and this is a DB) should have a purpose and not be a scratchpad for every program on your system.