Re: Runtime startup code for the GNAT Runtime...and a bit of humble pie.

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:1b0r595r7mo50.5ixrxomanvxr$.dlg@40tude.net...
> On Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:43:19 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
>> I think it's unfortunate that Ada has moved away from its bare machine
>> roots, because that is where the increased reliability really shined (as 
>> it
>> did on MS-DOS,
>
> This is of course true, but it was inevitable because Ada missed
> breakthrough of networking technologies as well as changes in the hardware
> architecture. It was not Ada's fault. Furthermore, it is not clear how Ada
> could incorporate these into the standard. That does not look doable. So
> the only alternative seems to be what we have now.

Clearly, the sockets library that never got a real proposal would have 
helped a bit (mostly for server-side work) on the network end. Having to use 
some implementation-defined thing (Gnat.Sockets, Claw.Sockets) or 
off-the-web freebee (like NCSockets) doesn't help anything. Of course, I 
don't seem much hope for Ada running in a web browser. (Personally, I think 
this is a good thing, I don't think much of anything should be allowed to 
run in a browser for security reasons. But I'm clearly going to be in a 
minority on this.)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "changes in hardware architecture". The 
mainstream architechures are well-supported by Ada (there is very little in 
multi-core that wasn't already anticipated by Ada, as Ada was designed for 
multi-processor architectures and there isn't much different). Most of the 
problem areas are less with the language and more with the implementations.

In any case, your overall point is quite correct. To a large extent, this is 
an implementation problem more than a language problem, but most people 
can't separate the two and in the final analysis, the distinction doesn't 
matter much. If people want to run their program mostly in a browser, 
nothing is going to help them much (because they're on the road to hell, 
they just don't know it yet); certainly, there is no way to bring the 
advances in static analysis that reenforce Ada to that area (at best we 
could combine an Ada back-end with a Javascript front-end in some tool, but 
I really wonder if the result would have many of the advantages of Ada left. 
It's a project I'd be willing to try if there was a supporter for it.)

                                          Randy.