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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5f7d72bde5bb96de X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-03-26 07:03:22 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!news.moat.net!border1.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!border2.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!cyclone-sf.pbi.net!151.164.30.34!cyclone.swbell.net!bos-service1.raytheon.com!dfw-service2.ext.ray.com.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Mark H Johnson User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is 3.15p -still- the latest GNAT 'p' release? References: <87wu5834r2.fsf@insalien.org> <40641888.80000@noplace.com> In-Reply-To: <40641888.80000@noplace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:03:02 -0600 NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.27.48.39 X-Complaints-To: news@ext.ray.com X-Trace: dfw-service2.ext.ray.com 1080313401 192.27.48.39 (Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:03:21 CST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:03:21 CST Organization: Raytheon Company Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6556 Date: 2004-03-26T09:03:02-06:00 List-Id: Marin David Condic wrote: > You could > probably freeze 3.15p and never make another release and still have a > perfectly usable product. Actually on Linux, that is not quite true. I have a very large system implemented on GNAT / Linux (still 3.14a, but compatible with 3.17w) but someday, we have to step up beyond Red Hat 7.3 to something a little more modern. At that point, we have the pthread compatibility issue to deal with. We have the following options at that point: - step up to 3.16 or later to stay with the older backend - step up to 5.02 or later to use the new backend Both of these official compiler releases have RH <9 and RH >=9 versions available. I don't expect the first option to be a good long term strategy because I expect ACT to drop support for the 3.xx compilers within a year or so. They haven't said that directly but the following statement in the 5.02a release notification appears to imply that... "The 5.02a release completes the transition from GNAT3 to GNAT5 for most of the GNAT Pro configurations." The second option is also not quite as clean as we would like. The backend in 5.xx appears to do more aggressive optimization and we have some broken code to fix (it appears we need to add some more pragmas for aliasing or volatile). It is an annoyance at this point (since we obviously have working code / compiler) but time will be needed to make the fixes. Yes - I am aware of the environment variable work around, but I don't see that as a good long term strategy either. --Mark