Re: Ada & MacOS

["Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com>]

Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> Maciej Sobczak wrote:

>> I'm writing this from Mozilla, written in C++, running happily on most 
>> desktop platforms you can find today. Have Mozilla been written in 
>> Ada, it wouldn't be much more portable.
> 
> 
> Interesting that you mention Mozilla. Take a look at their rules for 
> writing C++ for the project:
> 
> http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.html
> 
> Lots of things you can't use, including no templates (a few exceptions), 
> no exceptions, no namespaces. That's for contributing to Mozilla today, 
> because so many of the compilers used to build Mozilla for various 
> platforms today don't support these basic features of the language.

An interesting quote from the link is "But this is the reality of 
portable code" (which obviously must be understood as the reality of 
portable "C++").

One of the things that triggered my interest in Ada in my college days 
was that I had to work in a HP-UX at the labs, but could also work in my 
home linux (we also had meridian Ada for ms-dos in another lab). And 
never had an issue with portability. A different beast was trying to use 
the HP-UX CC and linux gcc at the same time. I remember special fun with 
templates, which have the extra amusing property of triggering dozens of 
errors but only at link time. (Really, how I hate link time errors.)