Re: Green Hills Ada library question (Ada on VxWorks)

["Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96" <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

dewarr@MY-DEJANEWS.COM writes:
>One interesting question here is whether you need tasking,
>or whether a minimal runtime system, of the kind that would
>typically be used in a safety-critical system, would be
>usable. One approach that some of our customers are exploring
>is the use of our GNORT (GNAT No Run-Time) technology that
>provides a subset of Ada which generates absolutely ZERO
>bytes of runtime. This means that you can simply generate
>object files and then run them to the bare board using
>whatever low level toolset is appropriate.
>
>One customer for example is using OS/2 as the development
>environment, and then GNORT for actual delivery to the
>target system (which is a bare board x86).
>
    I'm curious about GNORT. Does the "zero bytes of runtime" mean
    that there are no compiler supplied procedures or functions that
    are ever called to do some common task? By which, I mean something
    like common code that does a bounds check and raises an exception,
    or something similar. I do  not mean something like the standard
    libraries for math functions, etc. (Those you can possibly treat
    as regular packages as if you wrote them yourself, provided you
    have enough information about the actual implementation) All the
    code for whatever statements are compiled is generated as some
    in-line machine code?

    If you were to allow for subroutines for common operations like
    bounds checking, would there be any difference in providing
    subroutines for more complex features, such as task scheduling?
    (Other than the possible non-determinism. I'm thinking that a
    run-time library is not necessarily evil if it results in smaller
    code by sharing some frequently repeated operations and the
    tradeoff between procedure call overhead and space savings is
    reasonable.)

    Just curious about how this stuff is done...

    MDC
Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     Voice:     561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:       561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:  CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
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