Re: EGCS & GNAT Was (Re: GNAT versions)

[Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>]

In article <1999Apr26.074128.1@eisner>,
> In article <7g0qj1$1td0$1@Mercury.mcs.net>, les@MCS.COM
> (Leslie Mikesell) writes:

> > If the old versions are perfect, why is there ongoing
> >development?

First: no one said that the old versions are perfect, even
with respect to basic issues of conformance to the RM.
Every version of GNAT so far has had bugs. No amount of
testing can guarantee elimination of all bugs.

But more to the point, the great majority of our ongoing
development effort relates to new features, new tools,
new packages, improved performance etc.

Here is a brief excerpt from the features file for the
forthcoming 3.12 releases. I will post the whole of this
when we freeze the 3.12 sources, which has not happened
yet.

  The compiler is now built with options -gnatpn instead of
  -gnata. This means that the front end of the compiler is
  considerably faster, up to 2-3 times faster in some
  cases. The cases where you will see the biggest speed up
  are in -gnatc compilations with no code generation, or if
  very large specs are with'ed from smaller units.

  If pragma Suppress is used in the gnat.adc file, this now
  properly
  suppresses exceptions in all files compiled in the
  presence of this
  gnat.adc file (Suppress pragmas in gnat.adc were
  previously ignored,
  which is in accordance with the RM, but certainly not
  what is wanted!)

  On Digital Unix 4.0D, the run time now takes advantage of
  the full
  range of priorities (0 .. 63).

  In -gnatc mode, an existing up to date ali file is no
  longer destroyed.
  In particular this means that the -gnatc -gnatt
  compilations used by
  ASIS do not destroy existing ali files.

  A new switch -gnaty activates style checking features in
  the compiler.
  These roughly correspond to the checking done by the
  special internal
  -gnatg flag, except that -gnaty allows extensive choice
  of which checks
  are to be performed, and also allows parametrization,
  e.g. of the indent
  level that is enforced.

  The handling of aggregates has been optimized in many
  cases, generating
  more efficient code and less memory usage.

  The binder now generates an Ada package as the main
  program by default
  instead of a C program. The generated files are called
  b~xxx.ads/adb,
  where xxx is the name of the main program. The -C switch
  for both
  gnatbind and gnatlink can be used to get the old behavior
  of generating
  the main program in C.

This is just a small excerpt (the full features file
entry for 3.12 is about 200 lines long and growing), but
this should give you a feel for what continued development
is about.

Indeed our support activities these days are far less
focussed on fixing bugs than helping people use Ada 95
and GNAT features successfully -- though of course the
bug fixing activity is an important component still!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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