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Date: Wed, 25 May 2016 14:24:43 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Advice,  tasking and hardware
From: patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:30479
Date: 2016-05-25T14:24:43-07:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

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 Assembl=
y. While the interfaces.COBOL package is quite outdated and does not have k=
nowledge 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 hav=
e an easier time with C this time around.

I don't have any experience with tasking though and while I have many examp=
les of tasking in my books, none of them seem to call low level functions s=
uch as drivers or driver-like functions. I am planning on using the Linux-G=
PIB 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 har=
dware?

Would it be wise to wrap C driver calls in a protected object or are most d=
rivers in Linux thread safe and suitable for being called from different th=
reads?

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

Thanks for reading-Patrick