Re: Ada Compiler Pricing (was Re: Hijacking a Thread was RE: New Ada compiler for .NET)

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> You mention DDC-I and Irvine. Out of curiosity, what sort of price range are
> their compilers going for these days and do they target anything
> interesting?

As to pricing, I would rather leave that to the respective companies.   I can
say
the compilers are not inexpensive, primarily because they target embedded
targets with carefully designed run-time environments that are intended to
serve applications that require a high-level of dependability.   When one
examines the world of Ada carefully, it becomes clear that creating an RTE
is no trivial exercise.   It is easy enough to generate code, but for embedded
environments (what Joyce Tokar calls, "deeply embedded"),  one must
craft the RTE so it supports all of the generated code in a predictable way.
It is almost like writing a small operating system for each platform.

DDC-I supports a wide variety of embedded targets.    Irvine is a C-Path
compiler so it can be ported to many different platforms.  Once again, it
is creating that pesky RTE that makes it expensive to build such compilers.

I overlooked Green Hills in my earlier posting.  We have clients who are
quite happy with their compilers too.

The important point is that GNAT, for all of the good will toward Ada it
has generated, is not the only game in town.   ACT has done a remarkable
job with their current business model and produced compilers of excellent
quality.   That is just the first step when considering "deeply embedded"
systems.  It is not enough to generate good code.    One of the key elements
in selecting an Ada compiler for a "deeply embedded" system is to
evaluate the relative qualities of the RTE.  This is a point often overlooked
by those who naively believe that C++ is as relevant as Ada for embedded
systems.

One reason I characterized the new owners of Aonix as a bunch of ignoramouses
is that they overlooked this point and laid-off some of their best people, the
people who knew how to differentiate their product from others by creating
reliable, stable, and efficient RTE's.   I'm not sure whether they have learned
the error of their decision yet, but one can hope they have.

Richard Riehle