Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:wajahqy00a66$.1hz593k34vcwt$.dlg@40tude.net...
>> The proposal is very ambitious because it provides both a complex IDE
>> and a compiler for Ada 2012.
>
> ... designed in a [obscene, dying, vendor-locked, the list can easily be
> continued] language like Delphi. I doubt Ada community will be eager to
> contribute in Delphi. I did projects in Turbo, Object Pascal and Delphi,
> never again!

Beyond that, I'd be very suspious of any supposedly general purpose 
programming system that couldn't be created in itself. There is a great 
value to eating your own dogfood (as the saying goes). It gets rid of gross 
usability problems in a hurry, and it reduces risk in the project (as there 
cannot be show-stopping bugs in the development tools -- you just have to 
fix any problems that occur).

It does require care to avoid the Catch 22 situation where an old bug is 
preventing work using the old compiler and a new bug is preventing work 
using a new compiler so that there isn't any obvious way to do any work. 
(That happened to us once in the mid-1980s - I had to fix the bug in the old 
compiler with a binary patch in order to cut the Gordian knot and continue. 
Have been much more careful about regression testing before abandoning old 
compiler versions since.)

And of course, we all know that Ada is the best language for creating large 
projects. An Ada development system is surely a large project. There's a 
reason that virtually all Ada compilers are largely written in Ada. (Some 
share backends with other systems, but I don't know of any Ada frontends not 
written in Ada.)

                                             Randy.