Re: Lack of Mature Tools (was: Lockheed Martin, Green Hills, etc.)

[Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>]

In article <390472E9.E0A17BC6@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com>,
> Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com> wrote:
> The page cited mentions defects in both GNAT and Aonix.  In
> th interest of fairness: this project (NABK) also found a
> serious defect in code generation for protected calls in Apex.
> (However, Rational found the product the same time NABK did,
> so a patch was available within two days.)

Actually, as far as I can tell, this project did not make use
of the commercial version of GNAT, but used some unsupported
public version obtained somewhere from the net (and certainly
not from Ada Core Technologies). Yes, among the technologies
mentioned on the slides, it mentions that GNAT is the most
stable, but still this is NOT the commercial version of GNAT.
In fact we can't even be sure that it is the same bits that
we originally placed there. The advantage of freely available
software on the net is precisely that, it is freely available,
but the downside is you can never be sure exactly what you
are getting.

Actually we can't even be sure there were any defects in any
of the compilers. Our experience is that frequently people
think there are problems in GNAT, and instead it turns out
to be problems in their understanding of Ada 95, or unexpected
portability errors. For example, users have many times
complained that GNAT gets Natural'Size wrong (everyone knows
it should be 32 right :-). Of course there may have very well
been real bugs, but it's hard to tell. Given that they had
no support for the use of GNAT, it is not clear to whom they
could turn to understand what they observed.

This is perhaps a good opportunity to remind people that
although the widely available public version
of GNAT is very useful for student and research use, if you
are evaluating GNAT for use in a commercial project, and
particularly if you are evaluating it in comparison with
other commercial Ada compilers, then it is advisable to
contact Ada Core Technologies. Like any other commercial
Ada vendor, we can provide evaluation copies of the latest
version of our technology, GNAT Professional, and you can
then evaluate this with our support and help. For further
information, contact sales@gnat.com or sales@act-europe.fr.
This is not just a matter of "the interests of fairness", but
in our experience a huge time saver. Support is particularly
useful when you are first encountering a new technology!

I apologize if this is a bit too commercial of a message, but
in the case of GNAT, people often do not have a clear
understanding of the relationship of the public version
and the commercial version of GNAT.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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