Re: Windows CE?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3bab04cd.4954954@news.demon.co.uk>, John McCabe says...
>
>I am now working for a company that uses C++. We're developing a
>Windows CE based product, but the target is actually a CEPC. I'm
>convinced Ada would be a good (probably the best) language to use for
>our application, but without being able to demonstrate how it can be
>of advantage to us to use Ada (e.g. through an evaluation or public
>version of Ada for Windows CE that can be run on the target), my
>management will (reasonably IMO) not be interested.
..
>Of course you can justify not doing so by saying there is no demand
>for such a product but this may be one of these cases where people
>don't even stop to consider that there may be an alternative to M$
>eVC++ and eVB unless the alternative is very visible.

Someone from my company made very similar comments here a couple of years ago
reguarding VenturCom's RTX real-time Windows extensions. Personally, I wouldn't
have said that myself because, realisticly, there are oodles of OS's out there.
Sure, there may be a burgenoning market in several of them, but a compiler
company could eaisly go broke paying people to port their compiler to every
embedded and real-time OS variant out there with no explicit financial support
for any of this activity (particularly in our current economic climate).

Personally I suggest you do what I plan to do with RTX: Use "pragma No_Run_Time"
on small little side-projects for a while. This ought to give you a sort of
Ada--. :-) You'll have no tasking and you'll have to make Wince calls for some
stuff that most Ada users have in the language. However, C++ users would have
had to make Wince calls for that stuff anyway, so you're still better off than
you would have been with C++. Over time, you may be able to work (as a sideline)
on porting the Gnat runtime. If you can manage to get that far, I suspect ACT
would be more than happy to see your port in the GNAT baseline, and to support
it if paid to do so (assuming the code is in reasonably good shape).

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