Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?)

[Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>]

On 2014-03-19 19:04, Brian Drummond wrote:

> LLVM appears to have problems supporting nested (locally declared) 
> subprograms. This appears to be behind slow progress on the Dragonlace 
> project, to use Gnat as an LLVM front end.

Thanks for the heads up... I'll have to keep that in mind. One advantage
of having a project that is 99% talk and only 1% action is that I'm not
deeply committed to a particular back-end technology yet. I do know that
I don't want to deal with all the low level code generation stuff, however.

> Tristan Gingold has recently added an experimental LLVM interface to GHDL 
> (a VHDL compiler; I strongly believe Ada and VHDL users should talk to 
> each other more than they do!) and he also ran into this.

I tend to agree about the VHDL/Ada connection.

> As VHDL makes heavy use of parallel processes, he indicated he would re-
> use his implementation of processes- essentially closures - to support 
> local subprograms. I don't know the details of how he does this.

Scala supports nested functions on the JVM. It does this, I believe, by
creating closures in some way. I'm not sure of the details right now but
it sounds like a technique that is "well known" in some circles.

Peter