From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fac41,e1f75633467005b6 X-Google-Attributes: gidfac41,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,e1f75633467005b6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: stt@houdini.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft) Subject: Re: Ada95 vs Eiffel ? Date: 1998/11/04 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 408331385 Sender: news@inmet.camb.inmet.com (USENET news) X-Nntp-Posting-Host: houdini.camb.inmet.com References: <363F2D2D.BA71F028@club-internet.fr> Organization: Intermetrics, Inc. Followup-To: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel Date: 1998-11-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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 : ________________________________________________________________ -- -Tucker Taft stt@inmet.com http://www.inmet.com/~stt/ Intermetrics, Inc. Burlington, MA USA An AverStar Company