Re: Parrot for Ada?

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

Ingo Marks <adv@region-nord.de> writes:

> Slashdot has an article about "Parrot". 
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/02/07/31/1225200.shtml?tid=145
>
> Parrot is an interesting virtual machine, similar to .NET CLR and JVM.

It is rather different.  It looks more like MIX in some way; the
registers haven't got a predefined width, and there is no trapping
integer arithmetic.  It's pretty hard to compile efficient Ada code
for it, I suppose.

> AFAIK JGNAT is the only Ada compiler which compiles for a virtual machine 
> (JVM).

AverStar used to offer AdaMagic.

> Are there any Ada compiler experts here who could evaluate Parrot and tell 
> us if it could be(come) a suitable VM for Ada?

Unless the developers can be convinced to add fixed-width registers
(so that it makes sense to talk about Integer'Base) and trapping
integer arithmetic, I don't think it's suitable for compiling Ada
code.