Re: A few questions on Ada and Ada implementations

[Kulin Remailer <remailer@reece.net.au>]

> > Our clients also like being able to point one finger and if I sell
> > them something I have to be responsible for all of it and capabable of
> > fixing all of it. I can't blame anybody else or get 3 vendors involved
> > and anything free or open source would be a total show stopper. It
> > would be alot better if a complete solution was packaged together.
> 
> So if your product was based on Microsoft Visual Studio and Oracle, what
> would be different? I mean, your customers would still be on _your_ back
> and wouldn't be at all interested in whether the problem was tracable to
> a Microsoft or Oracle bug.

You're right. Thank you for saying this.

I don't know enough about what Visual Studio is/does but I understand
Oracle is a data base. I don't work with it, but point taken. In the
environment I work in we don't have dependencies on any third party
software or indeed any software except the OS on which the software
runs. In cases where we interoperate with a data base or other product (and
almost invariably those products are from the same company who sells the
OS) and that data base or product has issues, we have to be able to prove
we didn't cause the problem and give the guy who licensed the broken
product enough diagnostic info to open a problem with the vendor. Since we
code at a low level, tracing and capturing that info isn't usually too
difficult to do. We often win points with the customer when it turns out
not to be us and we helped anyway. We have cultivated a good relationship
with the OS/tools vendor so it hardly ever gets out of hand.

We also don't have runtime issues, because we are the runtime- there's
nothing between us and the OS. I'm glad you asked these questions because I
am starting to realize not only is the platform different but everything is
different. In my world if code broke it would either be us or the OS, and
it's easy enough in almost all cases to figure out which it is. In the PC
world it may well be we have runtime or middleware issues to contend with
and it's not just our code and the OS but quite a lot of software in
between. I'm not really comfortable with that lack of control, maybe this
isn't for me after all ;-)

> I'm not at all trying to suggest you should change your view of GCC, and
> it certainly seems to be the case that while FSF GCC Ada isn't
> encumbered, other packages are. Personally, I've always gone for the
> "GNAT-modified GPL" or, now, the runtime library exception -
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-faq.html .

As I said, I think gcc-Ada is outstanding. It was obviously written by guys
who were/are leaders in Ada compilation technology and from what I saw in
the bit of research I did it may be the only implementation that implements
all the annexes (annices). But if I am going to be able to write something
for the kinds of accounts we sell to now they won't go for it. It will have
to be based on a toolchain that some industrial company is backing up and
not have any connections to FSF or open source, those are deal killers in
the world I work in.

For my own purposes, before I get too fond of gcc-Ada since it's free and
so nice, I am concerned that ultimately FSF may change all their compilers
and runtime to GPL. I don't know why they haven't dropped this bomb
yet. I'm sure people do alot of working developing software and then one
day want to sell it as proprietary software. If so they have a big porting
job ahead of them to get it off all the GPL stuff they used to prototype
it. I don't want to go there.

Anyway thanks very much for your post. Your questions are helpful.