From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,31b8879c52cdbc65 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: Gnat on OpenVMS Date: 1999/05/23 Message-ID: <7i98hl$d8a$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 481185212 References: <7hshfq$5tc$1@front1.grolier.fr> <7i6aur$i1g$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7i74fa$9e2$1@front6.grolier.fr> <1999May22.193351.1@eisner> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x27.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 166.72.81.85 Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. X-Article-Creation-Date: Sun May 23 15:57:41 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-05-23T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <1999May22.193351.1@eisner>, Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam wrote: > It certainly is legally difficult if the contract from DEC > said not to integrate with the VMS debugger. Of course that > contract is only binding on ACT (and DEC), so somebody else > could make changes to GNAT, although for Robert to suggest > such an action would probably be bad form. > > Larry Kilgallen Just to clarify, the contract had no clause *forbidding* integration with the VMS debugger. Rather it insisted on full integration of GDB, so this is where the majority of the work went. I think there were the following issues involved: 1. Digital does not see major long term investment happening in the future for the VMS debugger, and so there is an advantage in shifting in the GDB direction (a number of other work station manufacturers are moving towards GDB for the same reasons). 2. In particular, there was no possibility of finding resources at Digital for Ada 95 specific modifications to the VMS debugger (remember that Digital's first inclination was to completely abandon Ada on VMS and push all their customers to DEC Unix, it was only when a number of customers notified Digital that this was not acceptable, that some attention was given to Ada 95 on VMS. 3. Adapting GNAT to use the VMS debugger would have been a major work item. Would it have been more expensive than adapting GDB? Probably, but who knows, we were never asked to bid on that adaptation. We did in fact do some minimal integration with the VMS debugger, line numbers and procedure names are compatible, and you can look at some very simple kinds of data. This was useful for getting the backtrace to work anyway. But complex data cannot be viewed. With some (non-trivial) amount of work, the integration with VMS debug could be greatly improved. But no one seems interested in funding this at the current time. Note that Digital was not unaware of the issues of switching debuggers. During the formal field test, Bart Nickerson made it clear that he would never be happy with anything other than the VMS debugger, and so Digital was quite aware that some segment of the market would feel this way, and perhaps always will (VMS users can be quite opinionated :-) like Ada folks :-) One thing is certain and that is that GDB continues to improve at a rapid pace, and we have found that most problems reported have been in the category of bugs that can be fixed in a fairly straightforward manner. In addition, major improvements to GDB continue to occur from our work, and also the work at Cygnus, and several other large companies (I am not sure I can give names at the current time, but you can expect some interesting announcements in the near future, both concerning companies adopting GDB, and concerning the maintenance of GDB itself). Yes, there will be some people who always will prefer the VMS debugger, and just as no amount of improvement to VI will woo away EMACS users, I am sure they will feel that way indefinitely. But in the long run, we are confident that VMS Ada users will find that GDB meets their requirements, and indeed a number of users are finding that it works fine for them right now. And by the way Larry, if someone wants to contribute the changes to make GNAT work better with VMS debug, that would be fine with us, I would be delighted to see that happen, it is just that ACT does not begin to have the resources to fund such work itself at the current time. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies --== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==-- ---Share what you know. Learn what you don't.---