ada commercial options

ada commercial options

[tonyg]

What commerical compilers for ada are available today. I know Gnats
available, are there any others still ?

Re: ada commercial options

[Vinzent Hoefler]

tonyg wrote:

> What commerical compilers for ada are available today. I know Gnats
> available, are there any others still ?

Yes.

Out of my head, so don't blame me for mixing company and product names:
Atego (formerly Aonix), DDC-I, GreenHills, Janus/Ada, IBM Rational Ada,
XDAda.

And there may be still some even lesser known vendors.


Vinzent.

-- 
A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying
razors.
   --  Waldi Ravens

Re: ada commercial options

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 4/18/11 8:49 PM, Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> tonyg wrote:
>
>> What commerical compilers for ada are available today. I know Gnats
>> available, are there any others still ?
>
> Yes.
>
> Out of my head, so don't blame me for mixing company and product names:
> Atego (formerly Aonix), DDC-I, GreenHills, Janus/Ada, IBM Rational Ada,
> XDAda.

More here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Installing

Re: ada commercial options

[Maciej Sobczak]

On Apr 18, 8:49 pm, "Vinzent Hoefler"
<0439279208b62c95f1880bf0f8776...@t-domaingrabbing.de> wrote:

> > What commerical compilers for ada are available today. I know Gnats
> > available, are there any others still ?
>
> Yes.
>
> Out of my head [...]

Well, it is a bit confusing without specifying the language variant.
Obviously, outdated compilers are much less useful today, as they will
exclude not only modern programming idioms, but also entire modern
libraries.

Considering that we have 2011 now, it seems reasonable to ask for Ada
2005 compilers (I think so). Having this in mind it looks like there
is only one commercial compiler on the market.

--
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com

Re: ada commercial options

[Randy Brukardt]

"Maciej Sobczak" <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:77c9c293-9fd3-4f3b-a754-83bf3d3be487@p16g2000vbi.googlegroups.com...
On Apr 18, 8:49 pm, "Vinzent Hoefler"
<0439279208b62c95f1880bf0f8776...@t-domaingrabbing.de> wrote:

> > What commerical compilers for ada are available today. I know Gnats
> > available, are there any others still ?
>
>Well, it is a bit confusing without specifying the language variant.
>Obviously, outdated compilers are much less useful today, as they will
>exclude not only modern programming idioms, but also entire modern
>libraries.

The vast majority of "libraries" written for GNAT aren't portable enough to 
use on other compilers, even if they only use Ada 95 features. In my 
opinion, a library isn't portable unless it is compiled on at least two 
different Ada compilers.

>Considering that we have 2011 now, it seems reasonable to ask for Ada
>2005 compilers (I think so). Having this in mind it looks like there
>is only one commercial compiler on the market.

Supposedly, the IBM compiler supports Ada 2005. (They issued an announcement 
to the effect last year.) It might be hard to buy a copy, though (it's hard 
to find it on their website).

The latest version of Janus/Ada supports all of the Ada 2005 syntax and some 
of the features. (But nowhere near all of it yet.)

So that's at least 2.1 commercial compilers (counting GNAT).

                          Randy.

Re: ada commercial options

[Maciej Sobczak]

On Apr 21, 1:24 am, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:

> The vast majority of "libraries" written for GNAT aren't portable enough to
> use on other compilers, even if they only use Ada 95 features. In my
> opinion, a library isn't portable unless it is compiled on at least two
> different Ada compilers.

How are the library writers supposed to compile their products on at
least two different Ada compilers if there is only one? You're asking
for impossible.

(We have 2011 now, so we're talking Ada 2005.)

> Supposedly, the IBM compiler supports Ada 2005. (They issued an announcement
> to the effect last year.) It might be hard to buy a copy, though (it's hard
> to find it on their website).

OK, so there is supposedly a product that the company does not want to
sell. In particular, library writers have no chance of testing their
software with it. Virtual products don't count.

> The latest version of Janus/Ada supports all of the Ada 2005 syntax and some
> of the features.

According to Google search, the RRSoftware website contains the word
"2005" only here:

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/tf/

;-)

And, let's be frank, supporting only syntax is a step in the right
direction, but still nowhere close to a working compiler.

That leaves us with 1 compiler on the market.

--
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com

Re: ada commercial options

[stefan-lucks]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2011, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> The vast majority of "libraries" written for GNAT aren't portable enough to 
> use on other compilers, even if they only use Ada 95 features. In my 
> opinion, a library isn't portable unless it is compiled on at least two 
> different Ada compilers.

Randy, could you describe which portability issues with real-world 
libraries you know? Dedicated low-level stuff is hard to write portably, 
but it seems to me that Ada actually makes it easy to write portable 
general-purpose libraries.

More precisely, Randy, could you give the authors of such libraries some 
hints how to write portable software, even without actually having access 
to another compiler?

All the portability pitfalls I can think of are either easy to avoid, or 
should better be avoided for reasons beyond portability, anyway. (Except 
for dedicated low-level stuff, such as "with system;" and 
"Unchecked_Conversion".)

  1. Avoid gnat-specific pragmas and attributes. E.g., write 
     "Type'Image(Variable)" instead of "Variable'Img".

(The gnat documentation is quite clear about what is gnat-specific, so 
this should be easy for any library author who cares a little bit about 
portability.)

  2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.

(The name of a package shows it: "gnat.something" is gnat-specific. Using 
packages from the Ada standard should be perfectly OK. Of course, some of 
the "gnat.something" packages are actually tempting ...)

  3. Avoid constructs whose behavior is defined as implementation-defined 
     by the Ada standard. 

(These should be avoided anyway, because the program behavior may not 
only change when the compiler changes, but also under a new version of the 
same compiler, or even with different optimization levels of the same 
version of the same compiler. Think of a program with several tasks and a 
race condition. The output may depend on which task does something first. 
Or think of "procedure P(V: in out T);" which, among other things, reads 
or writes X of type T. The semantics of "P(X);" has been left 
intentionally undefined by the Ada standard. )

  4. Don't assume a certain Size about system constants, such as
     Integer'Last.

(Again, this is good advice, regardless of cross-compiler portability.)



-- 
------ Stefan Lucks   --  Bauhaus-University Weimar  --   Germany  ------
               Stefan dot Lucks at uni minus weimar dot de
------  I  love  the  taste  of  Cryptanalysis  in  the  morning!  ------

Re: ada commercial options

[Tero Koskinen]

stefan-lucks@see-the.signature wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2011, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
>> The vast majority of "libraries" written for GNAT aren't portable enough to 
>> use on other compilers, even if they only use Ada 95 features. In my 
>> opinion, a library isn't portable unless it is compiled on at least two 
>> different Ada compilers.
> 
> Randy, could you describe which portability issues with real-world 
> libraries you know? Dedicated low-level stuff is hard to write portably, 
> but it seems to me that Ada actually makes it easy to write portable 
> general-purpose libraries.

I am not Randy, but I have developed my portable unit testing library
Ahven since 2007 and made it work on at least 4 different compiler
families:
 - GNAT (Ada 2005 mode),
 - Janus/Ada (Ada 95 mode),
 - Irvine ICCAda (Ada 2005 mode),
 - ObjectAda (Ada 95 mode).

In addition, most of my non-avr Ada code found from
https://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/ is tested with above compilers.

Issues which I usually run into are:

1. Compiler bugs
   - usually some compiler either doesn't understand the used syntax,
     crashes when parses the code, generates invalid code, or
     has a bug in its runtime. 
   - from the above group, Janus/Ada is probably the "most buggiest"
     compiler, but others have their share also.
     (And even though I think the Janus/Ada being on top here, I
     still recommend it if one needs a cheap commercial Ada compiler
     for personal use.)
   - especially FSF GNAT seems to be plaqued by regressions,
     for example FSF GCC 4.5 cannot compile Ahven at all
     (versions 4.[2346] are ok).
   - I could say that my Ahven library is a real compiler bug magnet.
     Even though all the code is plain Ada 95 and the line count
     is only around 2K-3K, I still "all the time" hit into really
     interesting bugs, which one would have though being fixed many
     years ago. (I think the rate is around one compiler bug per month,
     for those months when I have time to do development.)
     

2. Performance differences
   - Unbounded_String performance varies a lot between compilers.
     One compiler can be 10 times faster than another.

3. Implementation status
   - Compiler doesn't implement some more or less optional feature.
     (This is probably more issue with Ada 2005 than Ada 95.)

4. Compilers warn about different things
   - You cannot compile code in warnings=errors mode on all compilers
     at the same time.

>  4. Don't assume a certain Size about system constants, such as
>     Integer'Last.

This bit me recently. Even though I knew that Integer is only
16 bit long in Janus/Ada, I didn't take into account that the maximum
size of Unbounded_String is also limited by the size of Integer.
In other words, you can store only 32 Kbytes to Unbounded_String.

-- 
Tero Koskinen - http://iki.fi/tero.koskinen/

Re: ada commercial options

[Pascal Obry]

Le 21/04/2011 10:08, stefan-lucks@see-the.signature a �crit :
>   1. Avoid gnat-specific pragmas and attributes. E.g., write 
>      "Type'Image(Variable)" instead of "Variable'Img".

Ok.

>   2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.

That's not a problem. At some point AWS was compiled under GNAT and
Aonix compiler. I had just copied some GNAT packages (GNAT.Regexp, and
some others) from GNAT and compiled them with Aonix compiler.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B

Re: ada commercial options

[Pascal Obry]

Le 21/04/2011 10:08, stefan-lucks@see-the.signature a �crit :
>   1. Avoid gnat-specific pragmas and attributes. E.g., write 
>      "Type'Image(Variable)" instead of "Variable'Img".

Ok.

>   2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.

That's not a problem. At some point AWS was compiled under GNAT and
Aonix compiler. I had just copied some GNAT packages (GNAT.Regexp, and
some others) from GNAT and compiled them with Aonix compiler.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B

Re: ada commercial options

[Nicholas Collin Paul Gloucester]

Do not forget PowerAda and Ada Magic.

Re: ada commercial options

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 4/21/11 9:58 PM, Pascal Obry wrote:
> Le 21/04/2011 10:08, stefan-lucks@see-the.signature a �crit :

>>    2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.
>
> That's not a problem. At some point AWS was compiled under GNAT and
> Aonix compiler. I had just copied some GNAT packages (GNAT.Regexp, and
> some others) from GNAT and compiled them with Aonix compiler.

Since these libraries aren't GNAT specific, then,
would it be o.K. to place them in a subsystem
whose name sounds a little less GNAT specific? :-)

Like PAL, or GNU, or ...

(Other GNAT.* packages really are GNAT specific in that
they use implementation defined attributes, for example,
and cannot be compiled with other Ada compilers.)

Re: ada commercial options

[Pascal Obry]

Le 21/04/2011 23:13, Georg Bauhaus a �crit :
> Since these libraries aren't GNAT specific, then,
> would it be o.K. to place them in a subsystem
> whose name sounds a little less GNAT specific? :-)
> 
> Like PAL, or GNU, or ...

GNAT had been chosen no need to change that. It means that it has been
implemented for GNAT and not part of the standard. That's why it is not
under Ada.

> (Other GNAT.* packages really are GNAT specific in that
> they use implementation defined attributes, for example,
> and cannot be compiled with other Ada compilers.)

Many GNAT.* packages are not GNAT specific, or if they are it is
probably easy to fix I think. AFAIR it was quite easy when I did that
for AWS.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B

Re: ada commercial options

[Randy Brukardt]

<stefan-lucks@see-the.signature> wrote in message 
news:Pine.LNX.4.64.1104210935070.1184@medsec1.medien.uni-weimar.de...
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2011, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
>> The vast majority of "libraries" written for GNAT aren't portable enough 
>> to
>> use on other compilers, even if they only use Ada 95 features. In my
>> opinion, a library isn't portable unless it is compiled on at least two
>> different Ada compilers.
>
> Randy, could you describe which portability issues with real-world
> libraries you know? Dedicated low-level stuff is hard to write portably,
> but it seems to me that Ada actually makes it easy to write portable
> general-purpose libraries.

Tero got a lot of them.

...
>  1. Avoid gnat-specific pragmas and attributes. E.g., write
>     "Type'Image(Variable)" instead of "Variable'Img".
>
> (The gnat documentation is quite clear about what is gnat-specific, so
> this should be easy for any library author who cares a little bit about
> portability.)

One thing that will help a lot is the new Ada 2012 profile 
"No_Implementation_Extensions", which will prevent using any 
implementation-defined pragmas, attributes, aspects, withing any such 
packages, and using implementation-defined things allowed in the standard 
library. That gets a lot of it right there.

Some of these exist as restrictions pragmas in Ada 2005 
(No_Implementation_Pragmas and No_Implementation_Attributes).

>  2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.

This also is caught by the above profile.

What is nice about this is it will flag things like implementation-defined 
containers (probably found under Ada.Containers -- the language encourages 
such additions, but of course they hurt portability).

>  3. Avoid constructs whose behavior is defined as implementation-defined
>     by the Ada standard.

This is the hard one, and it is rarely done. Probably because it is 
virtually impossible to avoid such things (specifically, the range of 
Integer, the order that parameters are evaluated), and it is also very hard 
to detect them.

 >  4. Don't assume a certain Size about system constants, such as
>     Integer'Last.

Right.

I think you got most of the high points. The new profile will help, because 
it will at least eliminate all of the obvious non-portabilities. (I've often 
found uses of 'Unrestricted_Access in code I've tried to use, barf.)

                                      Randy.

Re: ada commercial options

[Simon Wright]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:

>>  2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.
>
> This also is caught by the above profile.

Unless a compiler has a special "don't allow 'with GNAT'" rule, I don't
see how it can do this?

Or is it that vendors are expected to disallow use of their own
non-standard libraries?

Re: ada commercial options

[Randy Brukardt]

"Simon Wright" <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message 
news:m2zknivnht.fsf@pushface.org...
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>
>>>  2. Avoid gnat-specific libraries.
>>
>> This also is caught by the above profile.
>
> Unless a compiler has a special "don't allow 'with GNAT'" rule, I don't
> see how it can do this?
>
> Or is it that vendors are expected to disallow use of their own
> non-standard libraries?

The restriction only applies to children of the language defined packages, 
since things like "with GNAT" are trivial to find and eliminate. Children of 
Ada, System, and Interfaces are difficult to tell language-defined ones from 
implementation-defined ones (especially as we keep adding them in each new 
language version - an Ada 95 program depending on 
Ada.Containers.Multiway_Trees is looking for trouble).

But for children of the language-defined packages, the answer is yes, they 
are supposed to disallow (when the restriction is present) use of their own 
non-standard libraries. That's the whole point.

                                 Randy.