Re: Garbage collection - was Re: Building a compiler (was: Fixed point multiplication ambiguity)

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <7ah65p$4ag$1@remarQ.com>,
  "news.oxy.com" <Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com> wrote:

> Expected and well understood answer would be: " We are
> glad to make Ada users more happy and we will do whatever
> we can to make this happen. We have such and such plans
> for future and we will do our best  to put then into
> existence as soon as possible. Please tell us more about
> your needs and you will see them implemented in our
> compiler/tools "

That is of course our attitude to our customers, and indeed
our customers are not shy about telling us what they would
like to see, and as you can see from the features list, we
continue to make major additions to GNAT.

Unfortunately, none of our customers has any interest in
garbage collection, so that is nowhere on our radar screen
for possible future enhancements (except of course in
JGNAT, where it is standard).

It is precisely this kind of feature which would be nice to
have, but which no paying customers are interested in, that
is a good target for volunteers to implement, and there
have been some such efforts in the past (most notably the
DOS port of GNAT).

You may argue that we should put in garbage collection
because it would gain customers, but our market analysis
which I suspect is in a bit better position than you to
guess right here says that this simply is not a critical
feature to the Ada community. The fact that every other
Ada vendor has made the same decision is indicative that
this judgment is correct.

> Here I would also remind Mr. Devar reply to my remark
> concerning GLADE distribution with GNAT 3.11 for Windows
> NT/95/98. It tells about the same:-"go off and do it
> yourself and do not bother us anymore".

Well here you are asking us to invest effort in a
particular area which for the moment we choose not to.
Again, we do not think this is a critical market
requirement. Especially because lots of people have
managed to do this on their own perfectly fine (we somewhat
feel that anyone who cannot build GLADE is unlikely to be
able to use it effectively in practice). We may build a
binary release of GLADE in the future, but we have no plans
to do it right now.
>
> As far as garbage collection concerned   Mr. Devar
> probably did not read my other message posted yearlier
> than mentioned at the top that I've already did it for
> myself (as a small experiment).

It is of course trivial to implement conservative garbage
collection, and any number of the commercial tools in this
area work fine with GNAT. That is of course a given, but
that is not what I was talking about, I was talking about
implementing full, accurate, compacting garbage collection
of the type expected in an Algol-68 compiler. That's a big
project, probably several person months from someone who
knows what they are doing, longer for someone who has to
learn.

Once again, Vladimir, it seems a pity that you don't put
all this energy into actually achieving something useful
in the Ada field, there certainly are lots of useful things
that can be done. We do a lot of development work, and
every new version of GNAT contains many new features
(basically the features that we and our serious users
consider the most important), but we can't do everything.
The point of opening sources is to encourage others to
help. You have all the raw materials to do lots of
interesting development, why not try it!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own