Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com> writes:

> One reason to use Delphi rather than Ada is licensing; IIUC the license 
> for GNAT would prohibit development of a commercial product and 
> [probably] the development of something that /would be/ used in a 
> commercial product -- I simply do not wish to burden users of this 
> system in that manner.

You are confusing "making money" with "distributing source code".
AdaCore makes money and distributes source code. Other business plans
differ.

>> 2) The Rationale section "Why Write an Ada Compiler?" provides a
>>     justification for writing an IDE plugin, not an Ada compiler.
>>
>>     You can easily extract text from the database and feed it to gnat, or
>>     any other Ada compiler.
>
> True.
> But storing it as unprocessed text means that you [well, your 
> computer/tools] have to repeat a lot of work (e.g. parsing) again and 
> again. 

Parsing is very cheap (Emacs Ada mode does it for indentation); the rest
of the compiler is hard.

GNAT is open source; you might be able to split out the parsing phase
from the rest, and use that parsed representation as the interface
between the IDE and the compiler (I have no idea if the GNAT Ada front
end is divided that way).

>>      b) Prevents people checking in code so colleagues can answer the
>>         question "why doesn't this compile"?
>>
>
> Non-working code should be kept out of the [main] code-base; this 
> situation can be handled with a chat/message-board (or similar) sort of 
> functionality -- There's *no* need to pollute your revisions with code 
> that cannot work. 

Not true; sometimes the reason it doesn't compile is related to some
other change you made. So you need _all_ of the code. And that's what CM
system branches are for.

What is in the main branch of your CM is different than what is in some
developer's branch; controlling the flow from developer branches to the
main (release) branch is a CM issue, not an IDE source code
represntation issue.

>>      c) Prevents writing skeletons; something I do when starting a
>>         totally new project.
>
> Howso?
> You can still have the procedure's "is null" spec; and Delphi itself has 
> been generating empty subprograms forever.

Emacs Ada mode skeletons don't compile in GNAT, but the indentation
parser accepts them. For example, 'case foo C-e' expands to:

   case Foo is
   when =>
   end case;

I can store that in a file, and since it doesn't compile, I'm reminded
to finish it.

Can I store that in your database?

>> 6) What is your business plan? You are proposing to directly compete
>>     with AdaCore; it is not at all clear from the proposal that you
>>     understand what that means.
>
> I understand that AdaCore mainly deals in support not, strictly 
> speaking, the compiler itself; 

Yes, because that's the way to make money. They use the money to improve
the compiler and associated tools.

> but even if this weren't the case, I'm of
> the opinion that the programming community could benefit from another 
> freely available implementation... especially one which doesn't share 
> the same codebase.

So you say. I have yet to hear why you think that.

-- 
-- Stephe