Re: Ada Annex E (Just curious :-)

[Dr Adrian Wrigley <amtw@linuxchip.demon.co.uk>]

Pascal Obry wrote:
...
> Ok, what about an Hello World example ?
...

I tried this example.  It worked, but I have a few questions:

1)  If I set the Starter to "Ada", it runs fine with Client and
Serveur on the same machine, but it won't start up the remote machine.
The client simply waits indefinitely.  The remote machine and the
local machine trust each other.

2)  If I set the Starter to "Shell", I get the following:

gnatdist: generating starter hello
gnatdist: *** unknown error

raised STORAGE_ERROR : stack overflow (or erroneous memory access)
(RedHat6.2/gnat-glade-3.13p-5.i386.rpm)

3)  The client takes about three seconds to exit after printing
the message.  Why so slow?  How can I improve this?

4)  The client/server bandwidth seems very slow and CPU intensive.
For example, when I make the message return a 100_000 character
string, it takes about 500ms of processing.  How can I improve this?

5)  What are people *actually using* this technology for?
Flight control? Banking? Scientific computing?  What example
real projects are there?  Is it for performance? reliability?
controlling many remote peripherals? real-time?
Is it generally homo- or heterogenous?

I would like to use something like this for programming a
processor farm of commodity PCs, but this is tricky if the
bandwidth can't be improved.

6)  Is there a ready-built version for use with Windows/NT?

Some of these issues (3, 4, 5) are touched upon in the documentation,
but I want to know if I am missing something!

Aside from these issues, my first impression is that Annex E
is "cool", easy to use and effective... all I need now is an application
that would benefit significantly from it.
--
Adrian Wrigley