Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?)

[Shark8 <OneWingedShark@gmail.com>]

On 19-Mar-14 06:24, Peter Chapin wrote:
> I have been planning to announce Augusta's existence to the community at
> some point but right now the project is 99% talk and 1% action (at most)
> and I had thought to wait until the balance was a little different.
> However, Shark8's announcement of his IDE proposal made this seem like a
> reasonable time. I support his desire to develop such tools and who
> knows... perhaps Augusta can play some role in his project someday.

I'm glad that it gave you a bit of motivation to announce your project. :)

It would be nifty if our two projects could "play nice" together; I 
wasn't considering making the translator proper a plugin, but maybe that 
sort of route would be beneficial -- it definitely bears thinking about.

> I am not as naive as I probably sound. I fully understand that such a
> project is massive and not likely to actually ever be completed.
> Fortunately that's not important to me. The project is just a hobby
> project and its *real* purpose is to provide me with a source of
> entertainment in my off hours. It can fulfill that role perfectly well
> even if it never amounts to anything.

Sometimes those are the best projects -- of course I might be a bit 
biased. (*Insert sidelong glance at the dozen or so projects that are in 
various states of [in]completion.*)

> This situation also frees me to
> make design choices that interest me without feeling the need to justify
> them rationally. For example Augusta will be written in Scala and will
> target LLVM. I choose these technologies because I like them and I'd
> like to learn more about them, not because I think they are somehow the
> "best" or most logical choices.

Nice.
I have Haskell on my "next to learn" list, and I think Scala is on there 
too... from what I've heard/read about them they seem like interesting 
programming languages.

> Right now Augusta is little more than a place holder with some documents
> outlining my vision for the project. I have set a release date for
> myself of December 31, 2020 in an effort to apply some structure to my
> work. My hope is to have something "interesting" done by that time...
> although I'm not going to claim it will be full Ada 2012.

2020 is better than the "someday" I have on a lot of my projects -- my 
OS project springs to mind instantly. (Though a lot of my unfinished 
projects could be seen as 'subprojects' under the OS-project.)