Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Ronald Cole said

"And those few problems that you do have (-O2 generates bad code on
HPPA) don't look like they're going to be fixed any time soon..."

On the contrary, gcc problems that affect supported customers have been
fixed pretty rapidly, we treat them like any other problems. However, the
particular situation you refer to (-O2 on the HPPA) is not in this category
since, as I assume you know, we are not yet offering support for the HPPA
version of GNAT.

We are planning on offering support for the HPPA version of GNAT in the
third quarter, and this is one of the problems that needs to be resolved
before we offer such support. Right now, this is certainly not a high
priority problem for us, since our priorities are dictated by our supported
customers.

That being said, we do have a lot of successful users of the HPPA version
right now, and some large projects have been successfully completed using
the HPPA version. Most of these projects (at least those we know of), have
not been significantly affected by the bug you refer to, although it does
(as noted in the readme file) affect the bootstrap. We still have to bootstrap
the HPPA version at -O1.

Note that there are some other critical issues with the HPPA port before
we can offer full support. In particular, we have to get tasking fully
operational, which is non-trivial, since DCE threads are quite broken
from Ada's point of view. We have figured out how to implement full Ada
tasking under DCE threads, but it will take a bit of fiddling around with
the runtime and he compiler -- which we are working on right now, since
there are other targets that will need to use the DCE threads interface.