Re: What's the state of current Win32 PC Ada compilers?

["Steve Doiel" <nospam_steved@pacifier.com>]

>I was wondering if anyone in USENET land had any real experience with using
>Aeonix or RR Software's Win32 capable Ada compilers for a large Windows NT
>project?  If so, was the compiler fast/slow?  Stable/Buggy?  Code produced
>had compiler induced bugs / clean?  Development environment decent / hard
to
>use?  Debugging facilities?  Would you use these compilers again?
>
>Thanks for the input in advance,
>John
>

We have been using ObjectAda as the target for 250K SLOC of code that was
translated from a dialect of Pascal.  The majority of the code was tested
quite extensively in its Pascal form.

The compiler is quite acceptable.  It runs faster than GNAT but slower than
Delphi.  I have not seen any bugs introduced by the compiler.  The
development environment lacks  a number of bells and whistles, but it
appears that Aonix is being quite conservative on releasing new features
before they are ready.

I started with ObjectAda 7.0 and have experenced a few updates 7.1, 7.1.1,
7.1.2.

The single factor that I have seen the most lacking of all PC based Ada
development systems is the Debugger.

In ObjectAda 7.0 the debugger was basically unusable.  In version 7.1 the
debugger started to have some (though little) usability.  Version 7.1.1 saw
great improvement.  I just received 7.1.2 and have not had the occasion to
exercise the debugger to see any changes form 7.1.1.  A completely rewritten
debugger has been promised for ObjectAda 7.1.3 which is due to be released
before the end of the year.

The team at Aonix has been very responsive to requests for reasonable
changes to their system and to finding work-arounds or corrections to
problems.

Yes I would choose them again.

When I selected ObjectAda the three development systems I was considering at
the time were from RR Software, ACT (GNAT) and Aonix.  In my case I had to
sell Ada as well as the development environment to my departement.  This was
much easier to do with ObjectAda than with GNAT.  I ruled out RR Software at
the time since they did not have a debugger available for their system.

I am guessing that the next publically released version of GNAT will include
a more comprehensive debugger than the one included with ObjectAda, but I
won't know until they release that version.  If you have deep pockets, then
supported GNAT may very well be the best route to go.

Other observations:
  Comparing a compute intensive application between GNAT 3.10p and ObjectAda
7.1.1, the GNAT version runs about 2x faster.  I haven't done any
comparisons with ObjectAda 7.1.2 and I know that they have done some
optimizations.

  With regard to tasking and protected types, a simple test shows that
ObjectAda's 7.1.2 task switching and protected operations are about 2x
faster than GNAT.  Your mileage may vary.

I hope this helps,
SteveD