Re: THAAD Study on Ada Viability

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

"Tarjei T. Jensen" wrote:

> I would not like to pay <insert vendor here> to maintain their C++ compiler for
> 30+ years because some project is using it. In fact, I'm pretty certain that I
> would have a hard time getting the vendor to understand the issues and keep
> that compiler supported.

This is seldom a real problem with any compiler. Presuming you have purchased a
compiler that is beyond being someone's Science Fair Project, you aren't going to
be turning up show-stopping bugs at every turn. By the time most projects are at
some kind of "First Release" phase, in many cases you want to freeze the version of
the compiler anyway (at least for embedded sorts of things this is rather common)
so that from a configuration management and verification viewpoint you can work
from a known quantity and be able to reproduce things properly.

I'd definitely take new releases of a compiler for some time into a 30 year
project, but well before the 30 years were up, I'd have frozen the compiler, the OS
and the rest of the development platform - until some external reality forced me to
move on! :-)

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================