Re: Using DCE RPC with Ada

[stef@heron.cfmu.eurocontrol.be (Stef Van Vlierberghe)]

In article <38m1po$gvm@news.manassas.ibm.com> crist@tbirdo.endicott.ibm.com () writes:
   ... both
   systems are multi-threaded.  Anyone out there have any experience, or at least
   some thoughts, on using DCE RPC with Ada that they would like to share?
   Thanks!

I remember looking at DCE-Ada integration on HP400 a few years ago. We found
that both DCE and the Ada runtime (this was for Alsys but goes probably for
Verdix too), were installing signal handlers (for SIGALRM) during their
initialization, and both were assuming nobody else would be tampering with
this setup. As both systems are to a large extent doing similar things, I
guess they would also both assume they "own" the (one-and-only) timer, signal
mask, and thinking of TEXT_IO, probably also SIGIO handler, tty settings...

This aside, getting a SIGTRAP is pretty wild. I would expect such problem only
when the PC gets lost (stack corruptions of some sort, rare event), or if you
have been running a debugger on a program that somehow got detached from the
debugger and hit a breakpoint without having the trace flag set, such that the
associated TRAP got delivered to the program.

If you really need this heterogenous environment, then you better don't use
tasking, such that you don't get these interactions (Alsys, and I think Verdix,
will link in a special non-tasking runtime system if possible).
--
Stef VAN VLIERBERGHE            Eurocontrol - Central Flow Management Unit
stef@cfmu.eurocontrol.be        Avenue des Arts 19H
Tel: +32 2 729 33 42            B-1040 BRUSSELS
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