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From: Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@no.spam.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: C to JVM, time to revive JGNAT?
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:09:24 +0200
Organization: CERN - European Laboratory for Particle Physics
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Date: 2006-08-14T09:09:24+02:00
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Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

>> No, but the biggest challenge in portability is the relatively small 
>> (when compared to, say, Java) standard library.
>> For example, write a web browser in Ada (net+gui+crypto+...) and let me 
>> know how much portable it is.
> 
> It is a difficult question. You cannot pack everything into libraries for
> obvious reasons. I can imagine a system without GUI, but it is difficult to
> do for numeric things. Then, when you say NET, I'd ask which one? Can I
> have field buses, multicast protocols, time-triggered protocols in Java?
> The next question about non-functional requirements. What can be said about
> rendering performance of that portable browser, how many numeric operations
> will be required for encrypting 1MB, etc?

These are all valid point, but the logic is fuzzy anyway.
For example, C, C++ and Ada support the concept of std{in|out|err} 
channels and their standard libraries contain appropriate stuff for 
this. But if we think about it, there are many platforms where the 
standard IO channels do not exist at all (most embedded boxes, I guess, 
and even "some" GUI environments as well), but the support for stdio is 
in the standard anyway. What's even more intersting is that there are 
probably more environments which support TCP/IP than those which support 
stdio (think "embedded boxes") - still, it's stdio which gets attention 
of standard committees, not TCP/IP.

There are obviously many factors that shaped this, but the final result 
is that most interesting applications are not portable. Java may not 
have standard support for field buses or time-triggered protocols, but 
neither has C, C++ nor Ada. The point is not in what nobody has, but in 
what they do have - with increased portability of final software - and 
we don't.


-- 
Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/
Programming    : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/