Re: ACT announces availability of GNAT 3.14p

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

dmitry@elros.cbb-automation.de (Dmitry A. Kazakov) wrote in message news:<3c5d136a.741292@news.cis.dfn.de>...
> On Sun, 03 Feb 2002 03:07:42 -0500, Leon Winslow
> <leon.winslow@eliminatespam.notes.udayton.edu> wrote:

> Yet XP is far less stable [if this word can be applied to 
> Microsoft products] than NT.

Actually our experience so far is that, at least as a GNAT
Pro development environment, XP is more stable than NT (I
am in the process of switching my own development from OS/2
to XP now, since unfortunately our tools have not continued to be
developed for OS/2, so it is time to say goodbye to the only *really*
stable system for the PC that I met so
far :-)

> So IMO ACT does it well. I believe there should be no big 
> problems with using GNAT under XP.

GNAT Pro version 3.15 works just fine under XP, and we
consider XP to be a fully supported target. It may be
the case that 3.14p works fine on XP, we just don't know
since we have never tried, so we don't like to make guesses. One
person at ACT tried it briefly and it seemed
to work, but that's as far as we have gone. This is just
a matter of timing, XP was not around when 3.14 was being
developed, but XP is reasonably compatible with NT in
practice.

> What I would wish, is GNAT for Win CE, but I
> also understand the reasons why ACT does not support it.

The reason is pretty simple, we never had a potential customer
seriously interested in this target (it is not
a hard port to do, and I guess the fact that no volunteer
did it yet means there is not much interest in the hobbyist
arena for this port either). Certainly there are many systems for
which GNAT could easily be ported if there
is interest (we just heard that the port Jim Hopper is
doing for Mac OS/X is coming along very nicely), and some
interesting new ports of GNAT Pro will be appearing soon
from Ada Core Technologies.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies