From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,13b7917466f2d19 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-10-09 23:23:16 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: GNAT and GCC 3.0 Date: 9 Oct 2001 23:23:16 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0110092223.72a80d0a@posting.google.com> References: <9a575af3.0110020747.2304ce86@posting.google.com> <5ee5b646.0110022002.7ccde025@posting.google.com> <5ee5b646.0110060639.31567261@posting.google.com> <9pr6e8$aai1@news.cis.okstate.edu> <%biw7.8780$H81.3054034106@newssvr30.news.prodigy.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.14 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1002694996 31642 127.0.0.1 (10 Oct 2001 06:23:16 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 10 Oct 2001 06:23:16 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:14116 Date: 2001-10-10T06:23:16+00:00 List-Id: Ronald Cole wrote in message news:... > Yes, gnat will be in gcc-3, but Mr. Dewar cautions that > it is "highly experimental"; which I interpret to mean > that he doesn't consider it as reliable as the gcc-2.8 > based gnat. I'm reasonable certain that > that wouldn't be the case today had Mr. Dewar really > opened up gnat five years ago and allowed a lot more eyes > on his work-in-progress. That would not have helped at all. All the problems are in gcc, not in gnat. The first task was to take all the fixes that we had published openly in the GCC 2.8 sources and fit them into 3.x. Richard Kenner did this work on behalf of ACT as you will remember, and it involved many thousands of lines of fairly complex patches. We then had to steadily fix GCC 3 problems to get GNAT to work correctly, and it is not a matter of us "not considering" the current version to be less reliable, it is that we *know* it is less reliable. How do we know? -- because tests in our test suite based on customer proprietary code are failing, and of course only we can work on these problems, and we are doing so (yes, once we understand the problem, we can create a small cut down example, but once we understand the problem, we can easily fix it anyway). We also have the problem of continued patches to GCC breaking things. Hopefully soon, more people will be building GNAT to test their changes, and that will help. But it is fairly frequent that people check in changes that break C bootstraps, so that problem won't go away completely. You have to be careful in picking up the snap shot sources to get a good set, and that means watching the gcc mailing list. In general I would advise anyone interested in picking up GNAT snapshots from gnu.org to subscribe to the relevant lists, and get a feel for what is going on. Originally we had wanted to delay submitting the sources till the test suites showed them to be clean, but we decided to submit them earlier, because they are in reasonable shape for many simple programs, and because then people can figure out build procedures etc (most of the useful discussions so far have been with respect to build procedures on the gcc list). Certainly Ron Cole was free, as was anyone else, to get 3.13 running on 3.1 (the issues of getting 3.13 running are identical to those of getting later versions to run, and as above, the problems are in gcc, not in gnat). In fact several people *did* try to get 3.13 running on GCC 3, but no one came near to succeeding, which did not surprise us, since it was a huge amount of work, and indeed the work is still not complete. Ron, please feel free to set to work and fix any remaining problems you see :-) Oh, and by the way ACT now has 35 full time people, "Mr. Dewar" does not make all the decisions, such decisions are made by the appropriate groups of people in the company, and represent a consensus position within ACT. Robert Dewar