Re: State of the compiler market

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 15:15:34 -0800 (PST), john@mccabe.org.uk declaimed the
following:

>I remember being at a presentation where Joyce Tokar was talking about the contract Tartan had to support their Ada compiler for 25 years or something on (I think) some Raptor system; I think that might've been 1994 or 1995. Presumably there is still some support for it, either from Tartan Software, Inc, for the TMS320C3x and C4x, or DDC-I for the M68K, i960 and Mil-Std-1750A but it looks like none of those even do Ada95.

	Not really a surprise... In the realms of avionics and likely other
high-integrity fields, even patching a compiler bug requires
recertification of that compiler (though the recert may only need to study
the section affected by the fix and take credit for previous certification
for the rest) -- along with subsequent recertification of the applications
produced by that compiler. Changing compiler on the level of Ada-83 to
Ada-95 and recertifying the entire software chain would be extremely
costly.

	As an example -- it is cheaper to get a Windows box with an emulator
(Charon-VAX) certified in order to run a previously certified OpenVMS and
Ada-83 cross-development system than to convert the development to a new
Ada compiler running on a different OS and recertify everything (sure, the
application still gets certified for each updates, but that's working from
a known base).

	Afterall, the lifecycle of the target hardware is easily expected to be
20-40 years.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/