Re: Critique of SEI's Ada DARK project

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

I'd like to open up a related discussion on this thread.

Based on the descriptions I've read here of DARK, it sounds like it
is a real-time distributed-processing real-time runtime environment.
This is very interesting to me, because I have been involved with
a number of Ada projects over the past several years that needed
just such a beast, and in each case the project invested considerable
time and money in building its own homebrew version (none of which,
to hazard a guess, was as well engineered as DARK).

Given that we all agree that reuse is a fine and wonderful thing, a
question naturally comes to mind: why did none of these projects
opt to make use of DARK? Was it not well-publicized? Were there
contractual obstacles to doing so? Were there infrastructural issues
that got in the way? Are there technical problems with DARK that
preclude its use on real-world projects? Are there projects that
HAVE made use of DARK, and, if so, what differentiates them from
the one's I'm familiar with (no flames that the differentiator is
my participation!)?

I think it would be quite useful for the SEI to do a formal study
to find answers to these sorts of questions, since we might as
an industry be able to do better next time. Thoughts?
-- 
**************** JIM SHOWALTER, jls@netcom.com, (408) 243-0630 ****************
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