Re: GNAT for Alpha

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> writes:

>>This leads to another thought. Are there any Ada implementations
>>targeted to the Itanium chip? Are any in the works. This chip seems
>>like a good home for Ada.

I doubt it.  Ada with its explicit loops might enable compilers to
generate better code than they do now for C, but looking at the
benchmarks, it seems as if the Itanium is a FORTRAN processor.

> That question reminds me a lot of the questions several months back
> about Ada compilers for MacOSX before it was released. Its a bit
> unresonable to expect an Ada compiler for an unreleased processor to
> exist.

Itanium systems are already offered:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/products/model_precn_2_precn_730.htm

On the other hand, it's hard to buy software which runs on the
Itanium, in particular on this Intellish machine.  You might be better
off with this one when you want to run actual software:

http://www.hp.com/workstations/products/itanium/i2000/summary.html

> However, I do think that an Itanium GCC is in the works.

Basic IA64 support is in GCC 3.0, I think.