Re: Embeddinator-4000 begetting an Ada-cross-platform future?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 12:20:49 PM UTC-7, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> Lucretia wrote:
> > Another closed, i.e. proprietary, compiler isn't going to help Ada, another free one will. 
> 
> Anyone can have another open-source Ada compiler whenever so desire:
> 1) Fork the FSF copy, so as to (apparently?) have the proper license.
Why? This will inherit *ALL* of GNAT's flaws and limitations.

> 2) Put an LLVM backend on it.  Either modernize Dragon Egg itself or conceptually repeat the entirety of Dragon Egg's old work differently in a more-modern release of GNAT and GCC.
You could do that with a non-GCC compiler.

> 3) Indeed, even ASIS it to semi-automatedly drastically refactor/overhaul the Ada code in which GNAT is written.  Even do this gratuitously for no reason to inhibit merging it back into FSF easily (unless someone else develops the anti-refactorer to recursively unwind the deeply-accumulated divergent ASIS-assisted refactorings).
This seems a bit convoluted; I'm not sure I get your meaning, or purpose here.

> 4) Always contribute all such evolution in GPL-compliant ways, such as on GitHub.
*SIGH* -- There's the start of a MIT-licensed compiler, Byron, I have on GitHub. -- https://github.com/OneWingedShark/Byron -- but there's only one contributor.

> 5) Go merrily on your way, never looking back at FSF (or at AdaCore).
Why even look to them to begin with?

> The big problem is never begetting the open-source repository itself for a 2nd open-source Ada compiler.
Objectively false; see above.
The big problem is that there's only one contributor, and he's disgusted with his lack of progress.

> The big problem is how to fund an open-source business model.  (Hence, why closed-source business models arise for entirely-different not-GPLed source-code bases.)
Not really -- there's plenty that can be done with (a) support contracts, and/or (b) specialized/additional tooling.

> Conversely, I would pay relatively-small-but-still-substantial amounts of money (less than $1000 per year per seat) for a proprietary closed-source Ada toolchain so that I could write both nonportable/SDK-specific UI/UX and portable backend-processing libraries all in Ada on iOS, MacOS, and Android.  
Turbo Pascal proved that a company could thrive by targeting small-businesses and hobbyists with relatively cheap compilers.