Re: Ada-95 Success Stories

[James E. Hopper <jhopper@erinet.com>]

In article <4xohnhpmck.fsf@leibniz.enst-bretagne.fr> Laurent Guerby,
Laurent.Guerby@enst-bretagne.fr writes:
>Richard> Well, this post is 6 days old, and there are no replys.
>Richard> Guess the answer is "NO!";-).
>

I guess i will answer as well then.

We rebuild from scratch (complete oo redesign and implmentation) of our
digital radar
landmass simulation (DRLMS) in Ada95 on the sgi using the sgi version of
gnat.  starting
from a beta, we went to the initial release and then into several
succeeding betas as
compile was continuouly improved.

our customer was amazed at how easily we upgraded form version to
version.  they were
used to vads where each new version required almost a rewrite to get it
to work.

our sim is basically a very fast real time image processing program to
take overhead
imagery and process it using a serios of proprietary convolutions,
terrain masking,
and other algorithms to convert it from the visual to the radar image
domain.

it was approx 30,000 LOC.

it processed 4 times the ammount of pixels at a faster frame rate (25hz
vs 32 hz) on the
same platform as our generation1 product under vads.  while a lot of this
was improved
algorithms there were a number of areas where ada95 and gnat made
signifigant speedups
to what we did in version 1.

Another issue of note is that we were the third contractor hired by our
customer to do
this work.  The first two failed big time.  the second contractor (who
shall remain
nameless) spent 2 million dollars getting to Preliminary Design Review
when it became
obvious from their prototypes that they were not going to be able to
produce a viable
product (Prototypes written in C by the way).  We were brought on board
went from
startup to CDR in about 2 months, and we have spent approx. 1 year on it
so far. end 
date is expected to be in the next month.  total cost slightly more than
half what
previous contractor spent getting to preliminary design review!

our developers were MUCH happier with the language, most of us would go
looking for
new jobs, i think, [i know i would] before we would agree to do
signifigant development 
on VADS again after working with sgi tools.  

product is still in hardware/software testing, but its going pretty well
considering
we developed it in the states, and its being integrated in austrailia
with most of
the developers here in states with no access to a test environment.
(customers choice)

We are strong proponents of Ada95 and would not go back, or change
languages short of
unemployment!! ;-)

Jim hopper
Chief Technical Advisor
Systems and Software Technology Division
SAIC

These comments are my interpretation of peoples feelings and DO NOT speak
for SAIC!!