Re: JAVA and ADA JGNAT

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <86p6c1$vo5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Jean-Marc Bourguet <bourguet@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <X_Fj4.425$0o4.13328@cmnws01.we.mediaone.net>,
>   Pascal Martin <pascal.martin@iname.com.nospam> wrote:
> [...]
> > I believe GNAT is Dewar's brainchild, and he has a parental
> > crisis: he do not want the kid to leave the house. Is he
> > still reviewing all the GNAT code that's checked in ?

GNAT never was a one person project, anyone who thinks this
simply is misinformed. I still do quite a bit of technical
work on the system (mostly in the compiler itself), and sure
I review code checked in to this part, but other people review
code checkins in other sections. The GNAT system and all its
tools is a pretty large program now, it is quite beyond any one
person to be familiar with all sections of it. We do try to
ensure that for any particular section several people know the
code well, and can review checkins.

We also try to keep the code extremely well documented, so that
it is relatively easy for people new to the code to read it,
understand it, and, if so inclined, modify it :-), we have
received many useful contributions from outside ACT.

It's quite reasonable to have a public tree of GNAT for people
to work with. That's a goal of the GNAT/Linux group [it seems
much more appropriate to have this done outside ACT than inside
it]. Indeed the plan of action that we worked out with this
group is to build that tree and then integrate it into the
main GCC tree [the GCC council is perfectly happy to see that
integration occur, it is just a matter of getting a versoin
of GNAT that can integrate into this tree].

Once this is setup, it should be relatively easy to maintain.
Unlike the case with Cygnus, there are never any very major
discrepancies between the internal tree and the public version,
because we completely synchronize frequently (this is not true
at Cygnus, I gave the Itanium gcc as an example, another one
is version 5 of GDB). In fact syncrhonization of the two trees
is a major task for Cygnus, one on which they have several full
time people working.

This by the way does not reflect any nefarious goings on at
Cygnus, it merely reflects the fact that they have a large group
doing many internal development projects on many branches of
the tree, and keeping it all synchronized is not easy.

By comparison the GNAT development is much more focussed, and
there is for example only ONE internal tree at ACT.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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