Re: Assuaging sour grapes :-) [was: newbie Q: storage management]

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

John Volan says

<<I should have said: "Isn't it feasible in principle using the _current_
definition of Ada95, without need for a language change?"  ObjectAda for
instance supports pragmas Import and Export with Convention=>DLL,
couldn't other compilers just do the same?>>

Certainly it seems a good idea to try to standardize these things across
compilers where possible, but it is a lot of effort to do so (the ARA
is one forum for achieving this, and we have had some small successes --
like the agreement on pragma C_Pass_By_Copy). The difficulty is of
course that there is a delicate balance between getting agreements and
getting good solutions (the C_Pass_By_COpy solution is a kludge, and
not a very nice one, but you have to be pragmatic, and Aonix had cut
their release with this approach, so we changed GNAT to be compatible,
even though we all were not terribly convniced it was the best solution
(it's a tough problem -- the ARG is STILL discussing how to best handle
it with no approach to an agreement -- and sometimes a kludge is better
than a wonderful solution never reached :-)

But going back to the COnvention=>DLL, I am not sure that I would
immediately want to follow this. I prefer a technical solution where
you can build DLL's without having to say anything special at the language
level -- right now in GNAT you don't need to say anything special to
build a DLL. Furthermore there are differences in what can be put in
DLL's, for example, in GNAT there is no difficulty in putting tasks
in a DLL. But I really don't know much about the details at all -- just
enough to suspect that we don't really know the best way of approaching
this problem, and it may be premature to try to standardize.