Re: [Announcement] New Project: ASIS for GNAT

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

"Jeff C," <jcreem@yahoo.com> writes:

> "Martin Krischik" <krischik@users.sourceforge.net> wrote in message
[...]
> > http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnat-asis/
> >
> > Current experinental versions are available via cvs.
> 
> Hmm..Might be nice to target gcc 3.4 since although it looks
> promising, I am not sure that GNAT will be released in gcc 3.5
> (which is currently targeted for tree-ssa)..

AFAIK, GNAT will be part of all future releases of GCC, won't it?  The
tree-ssa branch you are referring to affects only the back-end unless
I am mistaken.  Of course, such a massive change to the back-end might
affect the GNAT font-end; this is a quality issue which is orthogonal
to the existence of the GNAT front-end.

> This is nice to have since ACT has not provided up to date public
> releases since 3.15. Perhaps this will entice them to release one at
> http://libre.act-europe.fr

They have told me privately that they do plan to make more "p"
releases in the future; these will have ASIS and GLADE.  I am not a
paying customer, so please do not take this as a promise.  Obviously,
they did not mention any release date; like Debian, it will be
released "when it's ready".

I certainly hope, though, that the ASIS project on SourceForge will
coordinate with ACT in order not to duplicate effort.  I'm sure ACT
will appreciate the help.  I do not know whether or not they would
agree to doing all further development of ASIS on SourceForge.  They
did move their development of GCC to gcc.gnu.org.

> I suspect part of the reason for the hold off is that the FSF
> releases containing Ada have been generally more broken than 3.15.

Yes, switching the back-end from GCC 2.8.1 to 3.1 was rather
disruptive.  The GNAT in GCC 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 are essentially the
same; I would not trust them too much, and I second Jeff's comment
that it would be better to target GCC 3.4 for ASIS.

> Gcc 3.4 was looking like it might actually be a pretty good release
> for GNAT... I have not checked back recently on progress.

ACT have put in a lot of work in GCC 3.4.  It will be very different
from 3.3, and, I think, much better.  Although 3.4 has not been
released yet, the release branch has been created in January 2004, and
is in Stage 3.  This means that no new features are being added to it;
the only changes are regression fixes.  So, if Martin's project
targets it for ASIS, it won't suffer from the moving target syndrome.

ACT are still working actively on GCC, but only on the main branch
which will become GCC 3.5.

Since ACT still plan to make more "p" releases, I would suggest to
distinguish between "ASIS for GNAT", which refers to the "p" releases
made by ACT, and "ASIS for GCC", which refers to the the project
hosted on SourceForge.

Since GCC 3.4 has not been released yet, there is still a chance that
"ASIS for GCC 3.4" might be released at the same time as GCC 3.4.
That would be neat, but I may be day-dreaming :)
 
> Anyone run the test suite recently on any popular targets and want
> to report results?

That would definitely help.

For GNAT itself, the ACATS test suite is part of 3.4 and HEAD (which
will become 3.5), but not part of 3.3 or any earlier release.

Now, I am not aware of an ASIS test suite but creating one would
definitely help.  The existing examples from the source distribution
can serve as a starting point.  The ASIS project on SourceForge could
be the central point to publish reports.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.