Re: gnat on debian arm

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

Randy Brukardt writes on comp.lang.ada:
> Georg Bauhaus wrote in message 
> news:4f5f778c$0$6555$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...
>> On 13.03.12 15:13, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>>> Note that if you're going to program in Ada on such a machine, you
>>> might find that 256 MiB of RAM is very limited. You probably don't
>>> want gnat-gps or emacs as your IDE on such a machine.
>>
>> I had thought that 256 MiB is plenty of RAM for editing text and
>> running a compiler.  Editing without a "GUI" using a capable text
>> editor, including Emacs, should well be possible.

Maybe I'm biased towards large-scale development.  I have fond memories
of my old IBM ThinkPad T22 with 256 MiB RAM and a Pentium III processor
running at 900 MHz.  The performance of that machine should be quite
similar to that of a modern Raspberry Pi.  Compiling gnat 3.15p (400
kSLOC C, 300 kSLOC Ada) on that machine was OK but when I started work
on GCC 4.1 (2.6 MSLOC), a three-stage bootstrap with tests took an
entire night.  And building the other large package, gnat-gps, took 220
minutes on that machine and 17 minutes on its successor which is stil my
current machine[1].  Most of the difference was due to the increase in
RAM (256 MiB to 2 GiB).

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=100;bug=393636

>> 256 MiB is about the amount of RAM that were supposedly necessary to
>> _translate_ a compiler for some O-O language in the early 1990s.  But
>> I am sure I was happily running Editors, including Emacs, in a lot
>> less than that. In fact, I didn't know anyone who had access to a
>> computer with such an amount of RAM.
>>
>> Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM went
>> rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

Oh, you're bringing memories back... I started running OS/2 2.0 when it
was released on 4 MiB (very slow) and upgraded my machine to 8
(okay-ish) then 12 then 24 MiB, which *was* smooth.  Yes, the
architecture was quite good and I was also a fan :)

I feel like a dinosaur now :)

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.