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

["John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>]

"Kevin Cline" <kcline17@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ba162549.0301141202.235b38c0@posting.google.com...
> Commercial RTE's like VxWorks and LynxOS have been ported
> to most platforms and are much more popular than any Ada RTE.
> I don't know if they are better or worse, but what is most
> important to system architects is that they are widely known to work,
> and they are well-understood by many embedded developers.
> In the real-time shops I've worked with, proposing Ada for a new
> project would be considered rather radical.

Back when I was doing Ada, on whatever platform, the runtime was part of the
total Ada toolset package.  It came already integrated with the rest of the
toolkit.  The customer normally had to write a board support package to
integrate the runtime with the peculiar target hardware, but you have to do
that with EVERY executive (unless your hardware is COMPLETELY
off-the-shelf - very rare in military embedded systems - and the vendor
already supplied you a HIGH-QUALITY BSP to go with your boards - also very
rare in embedded systems).

And, for the record, a competently-written Ada runtime fits in about 4K.
(4K bytes on a byte machine, 4K words on a word machine, 4K whatever on a
whatever machine.)  (Ichbiah made that statement in an Ada training video I
saw back in about 1990 or 1991.  I checked it for the TI 320C30 Ada toolset
from Tartan Labs, and it was dead on target.)

I don't know how much VxWorks or LynxOS takes.  Anyone have the numbers
handy?