Re: GNAT versions ( was :Ada compiler for PC?)

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com>]

In article
<m3g15ovkpk.fsf@207-172-255-37.s37.tnt2.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.c
om>,
  Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Cygnus has regularly delivered the code for major
> features to the EGCS tree, and I suspect quite a few
> major features appeared in the EGCS tree before they were
> shipped to Cygnus customers.

That would be an interesting suspicion to back up. I know
only of major features in the Cygnus tree that are not in
EGCS. Indeed there are features in GNUpro that have not
yet been put in EGCS. I am sure they all will be, just as
all internal GNAT developments are eventually made public.

Yes, of course Cygnus drops developments to EGCS, no one
is saying that they don't. It is just that, as in the case
of GNAT, there is usually a lag between the development
of new features and their dropping into EGCS.

Of course anyone could take the public version of GNAT and
do an EGCS like setup for it (the GNAT/Linux project has
some of these aspects). However, that is much more
effective if ACT not only drops new versions periodically,
but also develops fixes for the current public version
that can go there without waiting months for the next drop.
But that is what takes very substantial resources, and we
don't have the resources to do this yet, although we are
hoping to do it on a limited basis starting with 3.12 and
specifically for the GNAT/Linux project.

Right now, GNAT is more analogous to how Cygnus handles
GDB. That may change in the future, but Cygnus feels that
since it does almost all the work on GDB currently, it is
not obviously worth their while to invest resources in an
EGCS like effort for GDB. That may well change in the
future, if other parties start doing major work on GDB.

The question of the level of activity from other parties
is of course a critical one. Most of the agitation with
respect to GNAT has been from people who want to get early
versions for their own use, and unfortunately there has
been relatively little indepedent effort (in fact two
of the big independent contributors to the GNAT effort,
Doug Rupp for the DOS port, and Geert Bosch for the OS/2
port now work full time for ACT.

I must say that Markus Kuhn and others seem to be having
some success in getting the Linux/GNAT project going, and
an interesting first event a few weeks ago was the first
submission of a patch from this project that was adopted
into the GNAT sources since it was correct and helpful.
A small start, but an important one, and perhaps the
harbinger of a more active development and flow of bug
fixes and improvements in both directions. Realistically
one can expect more action in the area of bindings and
tools than in the compiler proper, but who knows?


 In fact, EGCS began
> as essentially a drop of the Cygnus internal development
tree.
>
> Of course, I am not a Cygnus employee so I can't really
speak for
> their proedures, but that is how it looks to me.
>
> Also, even though Cygnus provides the infrastructure for
EGCS and pays
> a number of employees to work on it, EGCS is not really
controlled by
> Cygnus, but rather by a steering committee on which
Cygnus employees
> constitute a minority.
>
>  - Maciej Stachowiak
>

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