Re: ISA Support for Ada

[carters@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Scott Carter)]

In article <1991Jan16.190417.1@elcgl.epfl.ch> madmats@elcgl.epfl.ch writes:
>> Another way to pose the question is, "What would be the Ada compiler
>> writer's dream target architecture?" 
>> --Larry
>
>You may find an answer to that question by looking at Rational's architecture,
>which was made specially for the development of Ada programs. You may find
>Rational's address in a previous post containing the list of all validated Ada
>compilers.

Note that an optimal [however you want to define optimiality :} ] architecture
for _development_ is by no means necessarily an optimal environment for target
_execution_.  <this is not at all a denigration of the [very impressive, IMHO]
Rational environment, but I don't think anyone has suggested putting in on
the ATF>  In the embedded target, speed and memory optimality are generally
the driving factors, and the development environment is more of a maintenance
environment, where the tradeoffs are different.
>
>Another interesting RTS is BiiN's, which is entirely written in Ada. I don't 
>know what happened to BiiN, since I haven't heard of it for a year or so.
BiiN is defunct.  I hear various stories about what happened to the compiler
(chip production, marketing, etc. have reverted to Intel), but it doesn't
seem to be on the market (960 compilers are available from Tartan and Irvine 
Compiler Corp.).  We had a couple of low-end BiiN workstations (Model 6160, 
as I recall - att any rate only a single self-checking pair CPU unit), and
I don't remember anything particularly remarkable about the Ada environment.
The performance was pretty lously, but since our applications were largely
compute-bound I imagine that it was simply due to the general slowness of the
960 rather than anything about remarkable either way about the RTS.

>Mats Weber
>Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
>EPFL DI LGL
>1015 Lausanne
>Switzerland
>
>E-mail : madmats@elcgl.epfl.ch
>phone  : +41 21 693 52 92
>fax    : +41 21 693 39 09