Re: Suitability of ada environments for systems development

["John Duncan" <jddst19+@pitt.edu>]

Robert-

Thank you for your help. I do understand that this is an odd
place to put a vendor question. I did it for two reasons:

1. I don't want to get vendors' hopes up that something will actually
happen. (Perhaps I may have, I don't know.)

2. I thought it would be useful information to a lot of people in the
community.

What I am interested in is finding a retargetable standard library in Ada,
perhaps like a runtime kernel like someone already suggested.

What I do not want is some sort of operating-system specific solution, even
to the extent of the scheduling of tasks. I am merely interested in whether
someone has come up with implementations of the System.Interrupts and the
like to describe a lot of hardware. This is because I plan to implement a
sort of operating system myself, and I don't want the language system to be
making too many assumptions about what the operating system will do.
Afterward, I will probably commission a port of whatever language I use for
the purpose of writing applications on this operating system.

I am not exactly sure what the OS will look like, I just know that I want it
to be reliable and efficient from the ground up, and I believe that can be
done in Ada. It can also be done in other languages. The quality of the
programmers and the tools they use are both important.

But, like many things in this field, I await investors in order to find out
if my plans can come to fruition. In that, I do not know if I will actually
need anything, but I do know that a survey of the tools will help. :)

-John



Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:7ljcfr$nq2$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <7lis9r$oil$1@usenet01.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
>   "John Duncan" <jddst19+@pitt.edu> wrote:
>
> > Do vendors provide library implementations of the normally
> > OS-dependent features such as tasking and protected objects?
> > If so, could vendors please mention how their tools help solve
> > these problems? Good responses will facilitate choice of
> > platform for a number of users.
>
> That's a bit of an odd note. If you are interested in serious
> evaluation of Ada vendors, I suggest getting in touch with the
> relevant vendors directly, explaining your needs, and asking
> them for details. A very vague request on CLA is unlikely to
> draw useful responses.
>
> In the case of Ada Core Technologies, please send a statement
> of your requirements to sales@gnat.com. The other vendors have
> similar contact points.
>
> The question you ask shows some confusion not at all surprising,
> given that indeed in other languages the situation is confusing,
> and these are real problems! So now let me make
> some completely vendor independent responses that are really
> about Ada, and not any particular implementation.
>
> Tasking and protected operations are an integral part of the
> Ada language. Consequently *any* Ada compiler MUST provide
> completely transparent implementations of all Ada features
> including tasking and protected operations. Whether they do
> this with library implementations, inline code, direct calls
> to the operating system, special hardware operations or
> whatever is something that an Ada programmer does not generally
> need to be concerned about.
>
> Typically Ada tasks will for example simply map to operating
> systems threads.
>
> Basically then tasking and protected operations, while the may
> indeed be "problems" in other languages, are not problems in
> Ada, they are simply part of the well defined language, and
> for details of how these [non-]problems are solved you read
> the definition of the language, just as you would to find out
> how to add two integers.
>
> Robert Dewar
> Ada Core Technologies
>
>
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> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.