Re: Garbage Collection in Ada

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

"Fair enough.  But then, I find it hard to believe that implmementing
all the annexes had that level of payback either.  Except for the fact
that you can claim to fully support the entire RM (another good reason
why GC annex may have been nice :-).  Think about it, for example, the
DSA is a fine and wonderful thing but I can get everything it offers
in commercially available CORBA based ORBs supporting Ada95.  Not so a
GC...)"

Nope, that is wrong, we see clear evidence (real $$ coming in!) of 
significant commercial interest in the distribution annex. We are not
implementing it for our own amusement, or because we hope people might
be interested. The original work was kicked off by a large company
providing resources, and since then, other serious big customers have
been very interested (interest = $$$, not CLA posts) in this feature!

P.S. Jon is definitely a customer, my comment about it often being the
case that people are looking for something they can use free was not
meant to imply otherwise :-) Of course he is NOT an example of someone
not using Ada because it does not have GC. Now if Jon said he were
switching all his development from Ada to Java solely because Java 
had GC, that would be interesting, or at least it would be interesting
if it were a trend!