Re: [GNAT commercial USE] -- can i use GNAT to develop a closed source commercial application ?

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

Simon Wright wrote:

> Nor would GCC's C, C++ compilers be, of course.
> 
> I expect you could get GNAT certified, but you would have to pay ACT
> quite a bit of money. (The ACATS suite is available for download but
> it is not, AIUI, easy to use).
> 
> Last time I asked, many Ada compilers' certificates had run out (I may
> have misunderstood this).
> 
> But in any case, the affordable Ada compilers (public GNAT, Aonix, RR
> .. any others?) are all going to do an excellent job for you.
> 
> Our viewpoint for our supported GNAT compilers is generally that we
> believe the compilers could be validated if our customer wanted to pay
> an extra -whatever- over the contract cost, but neither he nor we will
> gain from it in practice.

It doesn't cost that much to get a validated version of GNAT.  It also 
doesn't cost much to run the ACVC tests against your environment.  The 
last time I worked on a project where doing both of those was considered 
good practice, the result was interesting.  The full validation report 
had 18 tests marked as non-applicable for one reason or another, plus 
the usual on number of digits in float types.   Fourteen of those tests 
passed in our environment, and four printed failed.  The first three 
were oh, yeah, no brainers, and the fourth resulted in spending more 
time than running the tests.

I don't want to go into why we spent so much time on the analysis.  I'll 
just say that the system had cryptographic components, and the deviation 
from the RM, while it was perfectly justifiable in terms of compiler 
validation, meant we had to redo part of our analysis of the code 
partitioning.  So in one sense it was all very worthwhile, while in 
another, it was a lot of makework.  (In the end, no code was changed as 
a result.)

--
                                            Robert I. Eachus

"As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure." -- Jacques Chirac, 
President of France
"As far as France is concerned, you're right." -- Rush Limbaugh