Re: Windows CE?

[john.mccabe@emrad.com.nospam (John McCabe)]

On 20 Sep 2001 07:56:55 -0700, dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) wrote:

Robert

>I would suggest that if you are seriously interested in
>a commercial product in this area, you contact the relevant
>vendor sales offices (for GNAT that is sales@gnat.com).

I am now working for a company that uses C++. We're developing a
Windows CE based product, but the target is actually a CEPC. I'm
convinced Ada would be a good (probably the best) language to use for
our application, but without being able to demonstrate how it can be
of advantage to us to use Ada (e.g. through an evaluation or public
version of Ada for Windows CE that can be run on the target), my
management will (reasonably IMO) not be interested.

In particular we have just shelled out on M$ Platform Builder and
eMbedded Visual C++, so there certainly won't be any money available
to help fund the porting of GNAT to Windows CE.

Our product is based on an embedded PC running Windows CE (CEPC). As
far as I can tell M$'s intention in CE 3.0 is that the CEPC is
available for development and debugging. However it sounds like
additional support will be available in the next version of CE and I
can see the CEPC becoming a common target in future. Given that
Windows CE supports much of the Win32 API, plus some extra real-timey
bits, perhaps it would not be that difficult, and worthwhile, to port
GNAT NT to Win CE.

Of course you can justify not doing so by saying there is no demand
for such a product but this may be one of these cases where people
don't even stop to consider that there may be an alternative to M$
eVC++ and eVB unless the alternative is very visible.