Re: Ada "library only" compiler ?

[Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org>]

Hi Again Niklas

Thanks for spending so much time with me on this.

"So? The package Ada.Command_Line is unlikely to be linked into your Ada
program if you don't use it explicitly. And the mere existence of this
package is a trivial burden on the compiler. And I would bet that the
code in this package is of trivial size."

Good point, I'm totally wrong here

I only meant that the Ada language is huge, I didn't mean to say anything bad about the final executable.

Thanks for explaining GCC to me, I was mixed up. I assumed that each compiler(C, Ada, C++) got the code down to ASM to be passed off to GAS and GCC was a dispatcher to full blown compilers that could exist on their own if used with an ASM compiler.

I am such a poor writer, I do seem to be having trouble explaining myself, let me try again.

So I spent a couple of years with Lua and my experience with it was that it is a language being pulled in two directions. The Lua team seem to think it is best used for extending and embedding in C but the community also want more libraries written in lua itself. The Lua team does not bless more then a tiny set of libraries(just a few thousand lines) and there is no official way to do many things such as serializing data.

My Lua experience has left me shell-shocked and worried about using a lot of the Ada libraries. It took a lot of time to learn various Lua libraries and after finding two or three crappy ones in a row, it got frustrating. I am not saying that the same thing will be true for Ada but it might be nice if all the Ada binding code was in a certain place. I like Lua still but if I am going to use it again, I am going to mix C libraries and Lua and pretty much forego the Lua libraries. It's easy enough to do this as Lua and it's tiny libraries are easy to keep separate.

If GNAT had a clearer separation of concerns between C and Ada, I could do the same with Ada or use Ada libraries when I want to but right now a lot seems to be bundled together and it is hard to tell what is binding and what is not.


I think Ada the language itself is perfect and don't have any interest in changing it in any way, it's the C portion I would like to tinker more with.  If GNAT had C split off somewhere and that code was "withed" into Ada code later, I might have a better understand of how it interacts with the OS and other topics.

Right now I don't know where the runtimes live or even what language they are written in. I don't know how they act on bare metal or with an OS. Keeping the syntax translation of Ada separate from interaction with everything else might give people like me a fighting chance of understand what is going on and perhaps even moving the language to new targets.

Thanks again-Patrick