Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam>]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:

>> Just look at who's
>> involved in the Hibachi project - Aonix are effectively leading it
>> with DDC-I and AdaCore having significant input, and supposedly OC
>> Systems and Green Hills are expected to contribute.
>
>We would have contributed if there was something that we could actually do.
>Aonix is (partially) a Java company these days, so they (presumably) have
>the expertise to write such code. We don't. I'm sure the generic Ada stuff
>will work fine with us. But the compiler-specific stuff has no chance: all
>of our tools only have Ada interfaces (with a few exceptions for the command
>line). For instance, it would be impossible to interface our project manager
>to something that is not a native compiled language (it could be done from
>C, for example, but not from Java byte code or .Net for that matter).

Not even through JNI (the Java Native Interface)?

>> While that's true to some extent, I don't believe the "never look at
>> it again" part is feasible - things move on underneath you. E.g. the
>> Win32 stuff that I believe Claw wraps has moved on a bit since I first
>> heard of Claw, which means you need to follow those developments and
>> update your wrappers, or risk being obsolete.

>I like being obsolete. ;-) (I sure as heck am not wasting time on Vista!)

>Seriously, good interfaces don't change incompatibly. (Even iffy ones like
>Win32 don't change imcompatibly.) So existing code continues to work. If you
>need the new functionality, then of course you have to add it in, but that
>brings you back to the new development stage. Most of Win32 hasn't changed
>appreciably since Windows NT 4.0 came out. Mostly, there are totally new
>interfaces to support, very little change in the existing stuff.

That's a fair point.