Re: Introducing memcache-ada, a memcached client in Ada

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Georg Bauhaus" <rm.tsoh.plus-bug.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de> wrote in 
message news:4d0f1ed7$0$6990$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...
...
> One more general comment, addressed to all interested:
> Don't we have a portable POSIX socket library?  As much as I'm
> fond of GNAT, placing GNAT's helpful, yet compiler specific
> libraries in every program will make them non-Ada (in a
> portability sense). In the case of sockets, I don't see a
> compelling need to be compiler specific?

There isn't. We had a project to make a compiler-independent socket library 
as part of Ada 2005. But no one took the point on it, and I simply was 
spread too thin to want to take on another major project.

We've talked about splitting "Claw.Sockets" out of Claw, since it doesn't 
depend much on Claw. (The origin of Ada.Directories was Claw.Directories, 
which also didn't depend much on Claw.) Tom Moran made an NC-Sockets ("NC" 
standing for "Not Claw"), but it'll have to be ported to Linux (which I 
don't expect to be hard) in order to be generally useful.

Claw.Sockets is mostly stream-oriented; it doesn't provide all of the 
functionality of the raw sockets level in order to make an abstraction much 
more like the file abstractions that Ada programmers are familiar with. In 
that sense, it is a bit higher level than the GNAT sockets and Adasockets. 
That seems better to me, presuming that you don't need the low-level 
functionality [not sure why you would, but I am never surprised anymore 
about that sort of thing].

                                            Randy.