Re: Gnat, tasking, Vista

["Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> tmo...@acm.org wrote:
>>   My understanding is that the current Gnat is not a 3.15p with
>> improvements, but is rather a substantially new thing, with new,
>> unknown, bugs.  Is that a mis-understanding?
> 
> IMHO your understanding is correct up to a point, but not for the
> current version of GCC (4.2.2) or the next version.
> 
> When AdaCore merged GNAT into the GCC sources, a long period of
> instability ensued for the reasons you outline. I never considered
> versions 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3 production-worthy and this is where I agree
> with your understanding. However, 3.4 was OK. With version 4.0, a
> major change to the back-end ("tree-SSA") introduced some new bugs in
> the interface with the Ada front-end, but 4.1 was OK again and the Ada
> part of GCC has steadily improved since (i.e. no or very few
> regressions). I have a very good feeling about the upcoming GCC 4.3
> because AdaCore and Sam Tardieu have recently fixed several dozen old
> bugs, most of which have been present since GNAT 3.15p or before. I
> anticipate that GCC 4.3 will be the best version of GCC ever as
> regards Ada.

This is very interesting. In regard to Ada 2005 features, the improvement is
also noticeable. GPL 2006 bombed quite frequently, 2007 *much* less to the
point of being a rarity. The only big thing I'm waiting to be useable is
interfaces. I wonder about the amount of differences between the 2007 and
4.x branches.