Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

["Jeff C," <nolongersafeto@userealemailsniff.com>]

"Stephen Leake" <stephen_leake@acm.org> wrote in message
news:mailman.46.1075258237.2270.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org...
> David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro> writes:
>
>
> > There are two GCC frontends in risk of being dropped in the GCC 3.5
> > release because of large structural changes; Fortran 77, which has
> > no active maintainers, and Ada. The cumulative effect is that GNAT
> > is effectively unsupported, where most of the other compilers
> > (Fortran 77 excepted) are casually supported.
>
> I don't know where you get your information; ACT says otherwise. They
> are making it a high priority to keep the Ada in the gcc distribution
> working and up-to-date. Not as high a priority as satisfying paying
> customers, of course. But they see a good Free Software Ada compiler
> as excellent advertising for their services. In the past, they have
> released public versions of GNAT, usually based on slightly old
> versions of gcc. Now, they are trying to keep up with the current gcc
> versions, since they see that as even better advertising.
>


Actually, he probably gets  his information from the gcc mailing list. It is
indeed true
that there is a chance (probably a good chance) that there will be no Ada
front end in
gcc 3.5 (which may actually be gcc 4.0...but that is a different matter).

That is not to say that Ada would not re-appear in 3.5.1 or 4.1. The issue
is that gcc
is getting ready to fold in a major infrastructure change that requires some
heavy modification
to the front ends. This is a major upgrade to the compiler and currently
creates a compiler
that runs a little slower but produces code that runs a little faster.  The
reason that it is still a "good thing"
is that in theory it will be easier to roll in new optimizations into the
compiler and actually make it much
better in the future.

Even the Ada maintainers on the gcc mailing list have indicated that Ada
support should not be a show
stopper for a 3.5 or 4.0 release. They have also indicated that they would
likely roll in the needed changes
at some point but that it is not a high priority.

So things are not as bad as they sound but certainly not as good as they
could be.