Ada-95 Success Stories

Ada-95 Success Stories

[Mark Doernhoefer]

Hey Gang,

It's 1996 and there are several validated Ada-95 compilers available.
Can anybody post an Ada-95 success story?  (Ulterior motive: I'd like
to know which compiler is mature enough for serious software
development.)  Please provide details of your experience including
host, target, rough SLOC count or relative size measure, compiler
vendor and version, and which specialized needs annexes were critical
to your development.

Please post to the newsgroup so open discussion can follow up.

THANKS,
Mark

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Richard B. Johns]

In article <319a6322.2564997@news.cais.com>, mdoernho@cais.com wrote:

> Hey Gang,
> 
> It's 1996 and there are several validated Ada-95 compilers available.
> Can anybody post an Ada-95 success story?  (Ulterior motive: I'd like
> to know which compiler is mature enough for serious software
> development.)  Please provide details of your experience including
> host, target, rough SLOC count or relative size measure, compiler
> vendor and version, and which specialized needs annexes were critical
> to your development.
> 
> Please post to the newsgroup so open discussion can follow up.
> 
> THANKS,
> Mark

Howdy.

Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.  Guess the answer
is "NO!";-).

Actually, in the project I work on, we are still doing Ada 83 coding and
going to classes to teach us the differences between Ada 95 and Ada 83.

We haven't been mandated to code in Ada 95, and we are not anticipating
having to switch and convert all our code over in the forseeable future. 

Oh well...

Regards,

R Johns

-- 
Richard B. Johns
TRW Systems Integration Group, ARMY Systems Organization
"The views expressed are my own, not those of my company."

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Laurent Guerby]

   Mark asked about "Ada 95 success stories", and Richard B. Johns
answered :

Richard> Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.
Richard> Guess the answer is "NO!";-).

   There's at least GNAT which fron-end is written in Ada 95,
bootstraped from Ada 83 with incremental use of new features. For
SLOCS, around 200K of documented Ada code, targets, may be more than
20 (GCC back-end plus portability-in-mind helping).

   Something to point out is that Ada 95 has been designed first, then
the compiler follow (idem for Ada 83). It's not the same process than,
for example C++ or ANSI C.

Richard> Actually, in the project I work on, we are still doing Ada 83
Richard> coding and going to classes to teach us the differences
Richard> between Ada 95 and Ada 83.

Richard> We haven't been mandated to code in Ada 95, and we are not
Richard> anticipating having to switch and convert all our code over
Richard> in the forseeable future.

   A priori, the convertion is not too hard for user code (not the
same thing for compilers ;-), an Ada 83 program is likely to be a
legal Ada 95 program (except in a few well known cases).

   So I think that by "convert" you mean "rewrite existing Ada 83 code
to take full advantage of the new features of Ada 95" ;-).

-- 
--  Laurent Guerby, student at Telecom Bretagne (France), Team Ada.
--  "Use the Source, Luke. The Source will be with you, always (GPL)."
--  http://www-eleves.enst-bretagne.fr/~guerby/ (GATO Project).
--  Try GNAT, the GNU Ada 95 compiler (ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat).

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Carl Bowman]

In article <319a6322.2564997@news.cais.com>,
Mark Doernhoefer <mdoernho@cais.com> wrote:
>Hey Gang,
>
>It's 1996 and there are several validated Ada-95 compilers available.
>Can anybody post an Ada-95 success story?  (Ulterior motive: I'd like
>to know which compiler is mature enough for serious software
>development.)  Please provide details of your experience including
>host, target, rough SLOC count or relative size measure, compiler
>vendor and version, and which specialized needs annexes were critical
>to your development.
>
>Please post to the newsgroup so open discussion can follow up.
>
>THANKS,
>Mark
>



The Ada Information Clearinghouse has reported on projects that used
Ada 95 in our summer newsletter.  The URL, if you are interested, is
http://sw-eng.falls-church.va.us/AdaIC/news/Newsletter/9508/summer95.html.
Perhaps these articles can serve as a springboard for discussion.

If the Ada Information Clearinghouse can provide more information , we
will be happy to join the discussion, but remember, we can't express
opinion.


Carl Bowman
Ada Information Clearinghouse

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Theodore E. Dennison]

Richard B. Johns wrote:
> 
> In article <319a6322.2564997@news.cais.com>, mdoernho@cais.com wrote:
> 
> > Hey Gang,
> >
> > It's 1996 and there are several validated Ada-95 compilers available.
> > Can anybody post an Ada-95 success story?  (Ulterior motive: I'd like
> > to know which compiler is mature enough for serious software
> > development.)  Please provide details of your experience including
> > host, target, rough SLOC count or relative size measure, compiler
> > vendor and version, and which specialized needs annexes were critical
> > to your development.
> 
> Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.  Guess the answer
> is "NO!";-).

Well, a couple of years ago I delivered a small project (~1000 ";"'s) 
written with an early, buggy verson of Gnat. As it was delivered early
and under budget, and I haven't heard a single report of a bug in it
since, I would consider it a success. However, since it was basicly
converted Ada83 code, and I had to work around some GNAT bugs (2 years
ago, remember), I don't think it would fit the original poster's
definition.


-- 
T.E.D.          
                |  Work - mailto:dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com  |
                |  Home - mailto:dennison@iag.net              |
                |  URL  - http://www.iag.net/~dennison         |

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[progers]

In <richard.johns-2105961647200001@philiplee.dh.trw.com>, richard.johns@trw.com (Richard B. Johns) writes:
>In article <319a6322.2564997@news.cais.com>, mdoernho@cais.com wrote:
>
>> Hey Gang,
>> 
>> It's 1996 and there are several validated Ada-95 compilers available.
>> Can anybody post an Ada-95 success story?  (Ulterior motive: I'd like
>> to know which compiler is mature enough for serious software
>> development.)  Please provide details of your experience including
>> host, target, rough SLOC count or relative size measure, compiler
>> vendor and version, and which specialized needs annexes were critical
>> to your development.
>> 
>> Please post to the newsgroup so open discussion can follow up.
>> 
>> THANKS,
>> Mark
>
>Howdy.
>
>Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.  Guess the answer
>is "NO!";-).

Well, I wasn't going to answer, but...

Several months ago I and one or two other people ported and demonstrated a 
uniprocessor version of a high-fidelity fighter simulator written in Ada83 
to a distributed, multi-microprocessor VME target using the Ada95 Distributed 
Systems remote procedure calls *in less than three months*.  The effort
included integration with two Sun workstations running separate programs
for the out-the-window view and the cockpit repeater.  Both of those were
written in Ada83 as well, by third parties.  

Usually the effort to port a sim is more than the time it took to do everything, 
including the intergation with the third-party software.  

We even included aural cues for the missle launches and explosions when 
the pilot shoots down the bogies.  Lots of fun -- a considerable amount of 
"validation" is included in the tree months cited. :)

Good people, good software written in Ada83 and a good design for Ada95 
distributed programming made it possible.

Oh, it included interfacing to the stick and throttle hardware too (A/D and
discrete point interfacing).

pat
---------------
Patrick Rogers
progers@acm.org

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[James E. Hopper]

In article <4xohnhpmck.fsf@leibniz.enst-bretagne.fr> Laurent Guerby,
Laurent.Guerby@enst-bretagne.fr writes:
>Richard> Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.
>Richard> Guess the answer is "NO!";-).
>

I guess i will answer as well then.

We rebuild from scratch (complete oo redesign and implmentation) of our
digital radar
landmass simulation (DRLMS) in Ada95 on the sgi using the sgi version of
gnat.  starting
from a beta, we went to the initial release and then into several
succeeding betas as
compile was continuouly improved.

our customer was amazed at how easily we upgraded form version to
version.  they were
used to vads where each new version required almost a rewrite to get it
to work.

our sim is basically a very fast real time image processing program to
take overhead
imagery and process it using a serios of proprietary convolutions,
terrain masking,
and other algorithms to convert it from the visual to the radar image
domain.

it was approx 30,000 LOC.

it processed 4 times the ammount of pixels at a faster frame rate (25hz
vs 32 hz) on the
same platform as our generation1 product under vads.  while a lot of this
was improved
algorithms there were a number of areas where ada95 and gnat made
signifigant speedups
to what we did in version 1.

Another issue of note is that we were the third contractor hired by our
customer to do
this work.  The first two failed big time.  the second contractor (who
shall remain
nameless) spent 2 million dollars getting to Preliminary Design Review
when it became
obvious from their prototypes that they were not going to be able to
produce a viable
product (Prototypes written in C by the way).  We were brought on board
went from
startup to CDR in about 2 months, and we have spent approx. 1 year on it
so far. end 
date is expected to be in the next month.  total cost slightly more than
half what
previous contractor spent getting to preliminary design review!

our developers were MUCH happier with the language, most of us would go
looking for
new jobs, i think, [i know i would] before we would agree to do
signifigant development 
on VADS again after working with sgi tools.  

product is still in hardware/software testing, but its going pretty well
considering
we developed it in the states, and its being integrated in austrailia
with most of
the developers here in states with no access to a test environment.
(customers choice)

We are strong proponents of Ada95 and would not go back, or change
languages short of
unemployment!! ;-)

Jim hopper
Chief Technical Advisor
Systems and Software Technology Division
SAIC

These comments are my interpretation of peoples feelings and DO NOT speak
for SAIC!!

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Mark Doernhoefer]

OK, OK, so maybe I was too quick in asking for Ada-95 success stories.
After reviewing the ACVC status for the various compilers from AdaIC,
I gather no compiler is ready for heavy duty software development.  Be
that as it may, I'd really like to see early Ada-95 experiences from
the trenches posted here.

Keep in touch,
Mark

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[James E. Hopper]

In article <31a4eb29.1625999@news.cais.com> Mark Doernhoefer,
mdoernho@cais.com writes:
>OK, OK, so maybe I was too quick in asking for Ada-95 success stories.
>After reviewing the ACVC status for the various compilers from AdaIC,
>I gather no compiler is ready for heavy duty software development.  Be
>that as it may, I'd really like to see early Ada-95 experiences from
>the trenches posted here.
>
>Keep in touch,
>Mark

Mark,

gnat is very much ready, and did a great job for us!!

jim

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Robert Dewar]

Mark said

"OK, OK, so maybe I was too quick in asking for Ada-95 success stories.
After reviewing the ACVC status for the various compilers from AdaIC,
I gather no compiler is ready for heavy duty software development.  Be
that as it may, I'd really like to see early Ada-95 experiences from
the trenches posted here.
"

Oh dear! More unwarranted reliance on validation. I don't know quite how
you are drawing your conclusions from the validated compiler list, but
there is no way from this list that you could tell whether or not a
given compiler is "ready for heavy duty software development". In fact
quite a bit of such development with Ada 95 is going on using GNAT, and
I expect that other Ada 95 compilers, e.g. the Patriot 2 compiler, is
also in serious use. In the case of GNAT, there are a number of successfully
completed serious projects.

But one thing is for sure -- you cannot judge from the validation state
whether or not a compiler is usable. You can have non-validated compilers
that are very much usable, and validated compilers that are completely
unusable. 

To understand this, note the following two possibilities:

A compiler that has been tweaked to get by the validation tests, and does
indeed implement pretty much all of the language, but is still completely
unreliable for large programs.

A compiler that is highly reliable for large programs in practice, but
lacks a couple of non-critical obscure features, not needed by these lare
programs, but significant enough to shoot down a whole series of ACVC tests.

The only way you can really tell whether a compiler is reliable for your
particular application domain is to try it out!

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Robert Dewar]

Another point to emphasize about Ada 95 validations is that during the
ACVC 2.0 transitional period (which ended at the end of March), compilers
could complete "Ada 95" validation by passing only the subset of tests 
corresponding to Ada 83. The test suite has quite a number of Ada 95
tests, but these are optional. If you look at the test results, you
will see that the profiles of validated compilers vary from zero of the
Ada 95 tests passed to a large number (more than one compiler passes
100% of the core, there is more variation in the annexes).

Nevertheless, a compiler that passes only the Ada 83 subset may still
prove highly reliable if what you have is an Ada 83 program (although
it won't help much if you want to write Ada 95!)

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Richard B. Johns]

In article <4xohnhpmck.fsf@leibniz.enst-bretagne.fr>,
Laurent.Guerby@enst-bretagne.fr (Laurent Guerby) wrote:

>    Mark asked about "Ada 95 success stories", and Richard B. Johns
> answered :
> 
> Richard> Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.
> Richard> Guess the answer is "NO!";-).

<snip>

>    So I think that by "convert" you mean "rewrite existing Ada 83 code
> to take full advantage of the new features of Ada 95" ;-).

Correct.  That's what I meant to say, but I had a keyboard mishap at just
that instant in typing <grin>.

Tchuss.

R Johns

-- 
Richard B. Johns
TRW Systems Integration Group, ARMY Systems Organization
"The views expressed are my own, not those of my company."

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[tmoran]

Two years ago I used RR's beta 9X compiler for a financial
data/statistical job.  About 3K SLOC was new (not converted Ada 83).
The client was happy with the result then, hasn't complained since, and
is still in business, so it must have been a success.  ;) But it only
used 'little' Ada 95 features like 'use type', modular types, etc.  and
not 'big' features like tagged, protected, or controlled types so I
don't think it really is an 'Ada 95' success story particularly.

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Robert Dewar]

tmoran said

"Two years ago I used RR's beta 9X compiler for a financial
data/statistical job.  About 3K SLOC was new (not converted Ada 83).
The client was happy with the result then, hasn't complained since, and
is still in business, so it must have been a success.  ;) But it only
used 'little' Ada 95 features like 'use type', modular types, etc.  and
not 'big' features like tagged, protected, or controlled types so I
don't think it really is an 'Ada 95' success story particularly."

Ted, I think this is a perfectly legitimate Ada 95 sucess story, it is often
the little features that prove really useful, and one thing to be particularly
wary of is the notion that a program is only "real Ada 95" if it uses lots
of the big features. Use only what is needed, sounds like your financial
job was a success, and did not need these big features, nothing wrong with
that!

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Theodore E. Dennison]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Ted, I think this is a perfectly legitimate Ada 95 sucess story, it is often
> the little features that prove really useful, and one thing to be particularly

I'd have to agree whole-heartedly with that. I could take or leave tagged types,
but I'm awaiting the "valid" attribute with baited breath. Never will I fear 
changing optimization levels again!

-- 
T.E.D.          
                |  Work - mailto:dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com  |
                |  Home - mailto:dennison@iag.net              |
                |  URL  - http://www.iag.net/~dennison         |

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Robert Dewar]

"I'd have to agree whole-heartedly with that. I could take or leave tagged types,
but I'm awaiting the "valid" attribute with baited breath. Never will I fear
changing optimization levels again!"

The valid attribute is implemented in GNAT, and, as far we we know, and as
our tests indicate, works fine.

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Theodore E. Dennison]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> "I'd have to agree whole-heartedly with that. I could take or leave tagged types,
> but I'm awaiting the "valid" attribute with baited breath. Never will I fear
> changing optimization levels again!"
> 
> The valid attribute is implemented in GNAT, and, as far we we know, and as
> our tests indicate, works fine.

I would have expected no less. Perhaps on my next job, I'll be using a 
platform GNAT is validated on (not on this one, though).

-- 
T.E.D.          
                |  Work - mailto:dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com  |
                |  Home - mailto:dennison@iag.net              |
                |  URL  - http://www.iag.net/~dennison         |

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Chris Morgan]

In article <31a4eb29.1625999@news.cais.com>, mdoernho@cais.com wrote:

> OK, OK, so maybe I was too quick in asking for Ada-95 success stories.

I don't think so, it's just that Usenet does not reach most of the "troops" :-)

My own small contribution is this :

I have experience in Ada and C++. Faced with a project to build a test
suite for our command and control system, I recommended Ada95 and GNAT in
the face of widespread expectation that we would have to use C since there
is a lot of low-level mucking about, and also scepticism that Ada95 is
ready yet.

So far my suggestion has been entirely vindicated. The work is going well.
Staff who are new to Ada find Ada95 and GNAT productive very quickly. Yes
they have some criticisms, but when they went off on a C++ course to help
them understand the C++ GUI the Ada will connect to, they came back
shaking their heads saying they were glad they didn't have to touch it!
(My reaction as well except I do have to touch it - yuck!)

Initially I was asked to stay within Ada83 programming paradigms as we
might have had to ditch GNAT and go back to a Ada83 compiler. Now however
we have confidence in GNAT (especially with the support we get from ACT)
and are gradually slipping in some new language features as appropriate.
So far we've used stream_io, the 'valid attribute, some text_io routines
that are new to Ada95, and I am experimenting with some tagged type
definitions to allow us to replace some horrible variant programming with
nice OOP.

Since the C++ compiler for the GUI is the Sun one (not G++) I have
connected it to the Ada with Ada stream_io. In the C++ I have overridden
each iostream operator for our base types with raw reads and writes rather
than ASCII and it works a treat. Simply using a named pipe in /tmp (Unix)
gives a shared memory connection for good performance.

About the only problem that has really held me up is that our Ada, being
strongly typed, uses a lot of fixed point types. These do not travel well
into the C or C++ domain since those languages do not support fixed point
types. I briefly thought of making a C++ template to support fixed point
types, but in the end my Ada thinks down to C level by converting into an
integer with appropriate explicit scaling in the Ada/C++ interface.

We're just getting into some real-time issues and here we are using some
protected objects, but I am also finding that my experience of Ada83
tasking is helping a lot. Certainly it's easier than using OS based
tasking from C.

This work is giving us as a company confidence to put our large projects
through an Ada95 compiler sooner rather than later as it looks like we
could switch some of our software quite easily, and it looks like there
could be major benefits.

My conclusions are as follows :

o Ada95 is great.

o GNAT is more than ready for serious work right now, and the price is right.

o If you know Ada, get familiar with Ada95 and the available
implementations   (GNAT, PowerAda, AdaMagic, ObjectAda) and consider
transitioning as soon as  possible - the next Ada95 success story could be
yours!

Naturally your mileage may vary (I think that's what the Americans would say).

Chris Morgan

Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[Robert Dewar]

In article <31a4eb29.1625999@news.cais.com>, mdoernho@cais.com wrote:

> OK, OK, so maybe I was too quick in asking for Ada-95 success stories.

No, you were to quick to decide you would get no answers, at my site, your
post saying OK, OK arrived *before* the post in which you asked the
original question. Remember that it can take quite a while for mssages
to get around on usenet.