Advice, tasking and hardware

[patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org]

Hi Everyone

I don't want to troll the list, I need some honest advice and I need to be honest about my goals, I hope I don't offend anyone.

I spent almost every night in 2012 studying Ada. I bought/printed 53 lbs of Ada books.

I struggled to find a GUI binding I liked and I struggled to work with C. I wanted to use Ada to avoid using C and I didn't understand C well.

For the past few years I have been using GnuCOBOL. I absolutely love it. It is much easier to interface to C with and it compiles to intermediate C so it's easier to see what is happening rather then going from Ada to Assembly. While the interfaces.COBOL package is quite outdated and does not have knowledge of modern COBOL it does work well and I can mix the two languages.

I am thinking about writing a backend in Ada again. I could do it in COBOL but tasking and exceptions sound like a wise idea. I feel I am going to have an easier time with C this time around.

I don't have any experience with tasking though and while I have many examples of tasking in my books, none of them seem to call low level functions such as drivers or driver-like functions. I am planning on using the Linux-GPIB library.

Sorry for the long introduction, to the point...

Do you have any examples of tasking calling low level functions?

Spark doesn't use tasking, are there many dangers in using tasking with hardware?

Would it be wise to wrap C driver calls in a protected object or are most drivers in Linux thread safe and suitable for being called from different threads?

Could anyone give me some general guidelines? any pitfalls to avoid before I set out to attempt this?

Thanks for reading-Patrick