Re: LLVM and Ada

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 10:18:10 AM UTC-5, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> Dan'l Miller wrote:
> >
> 
> > No contributions since October 2017 though.  That is a bad sign.
> > 
> 
> 
> Like I said, he hasn’t done much. He got the thing to compile with a more
> recent gcc, I’ve built it with gcc-6.x.

But did you contribute your work back to humanity, as he did?  Your work might have predated his and been useful to him.  Indeed, even if your edits are chronologically after his, your changes might demonstrate superior wisdom & insight & expertise that he would find useful.  An LLVM backend to GNAT won't happen unless all the wood is behind one arrow (as Scott McNealy used to say).

Often comp.lang.ada operates as (trolls? who are) raining on each other's parade.  I would like to see a greater community of positive forward movement, where like-minded bits of cellulose self-assemble as all the wood behind one arrow (or at least behind each disparate arrow of forward progress in an entire quiver of differently-focused arrows).  I am afraid that Ada is incrementally fading for no good reason (other than a preponderance of its programmers [and perhaps even its luminaries] having grey hair and retiring into obscurity).  •Every• sector of the Ada community needs to benefit from ever-increasing momentum in all the other sectors of the Ada community.  An LLVM-backended GNAT would be astronomically beneficial to the Ada community because suddenly Ada would be able to quite-publicly-visibly target iPhone & iPad & iPod Touch & Apple Watch, which is the most-conspicuous missing piece in advocating Ada as a state-of-the-art general-purpose language competing with C++ and Swift and Java across all modern OSes & OS-frameworks thereof.

(Btw, I always speak of iOS as an OS separate from Cocoa Touch framework and MacOS as an OS separate from its 3 OS-frameworks [Cocoa, Carbon, and XQuartz] and Windows as an OS separate from its 4 (?) OS-frameworks & APIs [Win32 old-school C-header-defined API, Microsoft .NET bytecode DLLs with WinMD, Xamarin Mono bytecode DLLs without WinMD, WinRT/UWP components processor-native DLLs with WinMD.]