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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: newbie Q: storage management
Date: 1997/05/10
Message-ID: <dewar.863280044@merv>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 240660438
References: <JSA.97May7210852@alexandria> <5l1qrs$9no@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-10T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


<<If someone did the work, and presuming they did a reasonably good
  job, then I would expect that ACT would be happy to fold such changes
  into the standard GNAT source code.  I suspect that for a fee,
  they'd be happy to support them too.  It certainly seems to me that
  it would be in ACT's interests for GNAT to offer garbage collection
  as an optional feature, presuming this didn't cause significant
  maintenance problems.>>

All these statements are certainly correct. ACT spends substantial
resources on continued development of GNAT, but we don't have the
resources to do everything that would be nice to do. Many features
in GNAT have got their start from volunteers (e.g. the ASIS
implementation, the much improved OS/2 port, the DOS port, the
cross-reference facility, the Linux port ...) And all these are
now supported (and indeed most of the volunteers involved in these
projects are now either full time employees or consultants for ACT. 

ACT has an interesting employment selection method, we don't guess
whether someone new *might* be able to contribute, we hire people
who have showed that they *can* contribute!

P.S. the above list of volunteered contributions to GNAT is very
incomplete, and omits a lot of useful stuff from a lot of people.
These contributions from volunteers range from major functionality
to little things, like bug reports sent along with a fix. All this
helps to improve the quality of GNAT both for supported customers,
and for unsupported users of the system.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies