Re: AdaMULTI/Ada 95 for Bare Board

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

On Tue, 05 Mar 2002 14:22:43 GMT, john.mccabe@emrad.ns.com (John
McCabe) wrote:

>Admittedly the problem I had was almost exactly 1 year ago, so you may
>have released a different version since then. Unfortunately for us at
>the time, it seemed that your excuse that the RM required this
>behaviour meant nothing would be done to improve it!

I have been in touch with Jim through email on this and, funnily
enough, it turns out that this feature that I was told by Green Hills
was *required* by the RM, has been fixed!

According to Jim, it was fixed in a Summer 2001 release of Green Hills
Ada. Funny that it shouldn't be a bug in Spring 2001, it should be a
*required* feature, but by Summer 2001 it isn't a *required* feature
any more and has been fixed!

So, while I apologise for pointing out the risks of a *feature* (bug)
that has now been fixed, I can't say I'm very happy about the way my
report was handled!

On a more positive note, I would recommend AdaMulti (as long as I
didn't have to pay for it!). We really didn't have many problems with
it in the time I was using it (at least not that I noticed), and it
even got some of the 'private extension of a tagged type with a
discrimant' features right (which I seem to remember weren't handled
correctly by ObjectAda or Apex).

Performance of compiled code seemed reasonable, but we were using it
on VxWorks so they didn't have to worry too much about the RTS.

As far as IDE useability is concerned it was, I'd say, better than
Apex, but not as good as ObjectAda (Visual C++ environment is really
quite nice). Target debugging facilities were, on the whole, very
good, although at the time (up to 8 months ago) it was still fairly
easy to tell that the debugger was derived from a C/C++ model!

The only other thing I remember as being a nuisance was that when you
added source components to a build file, it rebuilt the whole system
(which took ages on our system)! I think this was to do with the way
that the build files were a project dependency. You could set an
option for the build files *not* to be included as a dependency, but
then it would ignore the fact you'd changed one!

As I say, I stopped using AdaMulti around 8 months ago and, on the
whole, it was a fairly pleasant experience.

John