Re: Ada95 vs Eiffel ?

[stt@houdini.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

Luis Ibanez (luisiban@club-internet.fr) wrote:

: I'm planning to develop a critical 
: application related with real time
: visualization of 3D medical data.

: This application is intended to 
: run in a surgery room.

: The application could be run
: on QNX or LYNX real time operating
: systems (with an inocuous version
: for windows NT...), and will 
: intensively use calls to OpenGL.

: I'm analyzing the alternatives of
: good languages for this kind of 
: tasks. By now, the finalist are
: Ada and Eiffel,:


: Eiffel :because its natural support
:         of "design by contract".


: Ada95  : because it has a long tradition
:          in critical systems developments.


: Can anybody give me some advices
: about this choice ?

Echoing what others have said, Ada is specifically designed for
real-time, safety-critical, embedded systems.  You can build
a significant Ada system with no dynamic allocation and 
little or no run-time support.  For what run-time support
you need, there are certified run-times available from multiple
Ada vendors, and you can write your own heap "storage-pool" manager
for any dynamic allocation you require.

By contrast, Eiffel depends fundamentally on dynamic allocation
and garbage collection.  That can be very nice in a desktop environment,
but can be troublesome in a resource-constrained, safety-critical,
real-time environment.

For what it is worth, there are also garbage collectors which can
be used with Ada when garbage collection is the preferred storage
management mechanism.

: Thanks in advance.

: PD. as a secondary point, 
: which of this languages 
: provides a more "secure" support
: for graphical user interfaces ?
: (like xforms, gtk, qt ...)

The "pragma Import" mechanism in Ada 95 is quite easy to use,
making it straightforward to access existing GUI subsystems.  Also,
there are some ready-to-go Ada interfaces for certain GUI
subsystems.  Consult one of the Ada vendors (see www.adaresource.org
for a partial list).

: -- 
: ________________________________________________________________

: Luis Eduardo IBANEZ

: PhD Student
: Departement Image et Traitement de l'Information
: Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications de Bretagne
: Technopole de Brest-Iroise BP 832,  29285 BREST - FRANCE
: Tel (33)2.98.00.13.57      Fax (33)2.98.00.10.98
: e-mail: luis.ibanez@ieee.org
: home page: http://www-iti.enst-bretagne.fr/~ibanez
: ________________________________________________________________

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-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
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