GNAT boostrap announced

GNAT boostrap announced

[cis.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.]

The GNAT project is delighted to report that the GNAT compiler was 
successfully boostrapped today, June 9,at 12:23 pm. The standard 
verification procedure was used:

a) The GNAT sources were compiled with the Alsys compiler, to produce 
   executable G1. 

b) G1, the interface program Gigi, and Gcc, were used to compile the 
   GNAT sources and produce executable G2.

c) When applied to the GNAT sources, G2 reproduced itself byte for byte.

Thanks to the portability of Gcc, within minutes of the replication on the 
SUN/SPARC the same replication was achieved on the DEC/Alpha.

Although this is an important milestone for the project, we should 
emphasize that GNAT is written in a subset of Ada83, and for now only 
compiles a (sizeable) subset of Ada9X.  We are fully aware of what remains
to be done.

The performance of the bootstrapped GNAT is gratifying. Timing figures are 
very preliminary: currently inlining is not performed. We expect the final 
version to gain an additional factor of 2 in speed over the current one.
Given these caveats, the following figures should be of interest:

a) The GNAT sources (82,000 lines of text, 26000 semicolons) are fully 
   parsed in 35 seconds on a SPARC/IPX, and in 6.8 seconds on the Alpha.

b) Full semantic analysis of all sources takes 112 seconds on the SPARC. 
   (including generation of intermediate file).

c) Semantics, code generation, assembly and linking takes 389 seconds on
   the SPARC.

The above figures were obtained running GNAT with no debuuging checks and
no constraint checks.

The sources and binaries for the GNAT system will be available by anonymous
ftp on July 4th. We choose that date to mark the fact we have become 
self-sufficient, and independent of other compiler technology! We will 
make available sources and Makefiles for all components of the system, 
as well as binaries for a few machines. 

The bootstrapped system will be demonstrated next week at the Ada-Europe
conference, and in three weeks at the Washington Ada Symposium. 

The GNAT project:
-----------------
Bernard Banner
Cyrille Comar
Robert Dewar
Sam Figueroa
Franco Gasperoni
Richard Kenner
Bruno Leclerc
Brett Porter
Ed Schonberg
Gail Schenker