Re: GNAT Ada - DLL - MSVC - debugging

[David Marceau <davidmarceau@sympatico.ca>]

"Alderson, Paul A." wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am using the Gnat Ada compiler to produce an Ada DLL that is used by the
> Microsoft Visual C++.
> Currently everything is working, but I have no debugging information
> available.  I have searched the web for a possible solution, but have found
> no working solutions.
> The reason I need to use Ada in a DLL in the C++ environment is because I am
> attempting to save a large Ada development effort by adding a new GUI for
> it.  Other Ada GUI's and compilers have been less than impressive.  This
Which Ada GUI's and compilers have you looked at?
Could you clarify how you arrived at your decision to go with MSVC++?
Which criteria did you use and how did you weigh them?
Is there someone pushing you politically to use MSVC/MS-windows or any
other tool for that matter?
Have you considered using Linux(or other UNIXES)/gnat/gtkada?
Have you consideted using Linux(or other UNIXES)/gnat/motif?
Using these alternatives, you can gnatmake -g and debug linux
dlls(shared libraries .so) 
with and gdb locally or remotely.

If you have seen/tried these, could you clarify why they aren't "working
solutions"?
> solution seems to be working good, but it is difficult to debug.  If you
> know of a good example of accessing debug information from MSVC using an Ada
> DLL I would appreciate hearing about it.
> 
> Thanks
> Paul Alderson

IMHO If you want to save your "LARGE ADA DEVELOPMENT EFFORT", continue
building your gui with ADA.
IMHO The flash file format(.swf) is a wonderful gui architecture.
Some beautiful examples:
http://www.simtlc.org/simtlcmain.htm
http://www.polaris-nl.com/sendacard.html
http://www.joecartoon.com/pages/nannahooter/

IMHO my dream multi-platform state-of-the-art gui:
1)The web browser itself and the web browser flash player plug-in should
be re-written in ada.
2)The ming flash file generation api for c/php/perl
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ming
  or swift api http://www.swift-tools.com/ or some other similar api...
 should be re-written in ada.
3)Start using an ada-based ming flash file generator for building the
gui.
4)In the back-end serving up all these files would obviously be AWS
http://libre.act-europe.fr/aws/

I hope this helps.

Sant� bonheur,
David Marceau