Re: Studying and Maintaining GNAT, Is There Any Interest in a New Group?

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org writes:

> I was wondering if the patches came from a group, whether the GCC
> people would accept them without or without Adacore.

I'm far from expert on GCC procedures, but all three of the Ada
front-end maintainers (see [1]) are AdaCore employees, and I don't think
you're going to get approval for updates to Ada internals from anyone
else.

If it's OS-related (I see some of this because Darwin) you stand more
chance.

[1] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS

> I know what trouble you have had with GCC and trying to get GNAT
> ported over to ARM many years ago.

That was very frustrating. When others (including me) joined in with
more evidence things improved.

But it can be hard to get the evidence, particularly for rare
happenings; I'm convinced there's a bug in the bare-board RTS related to
an interrupt occuring during a protected entry, reported almost a year
ago, no resolution yet so far as I know.

> However, could it be safe to say that most of the bugs are in the
> runtime and not in the code generation?

When a new compiler release is being made, almost all the bugs will be
in the compiler; the RTS is pretty stable. The interface to the RTS can
change a bit (for Cortex GNAT RTS, GCC7->GCC8 involved a minor change to
the way tagged types are handled, and how secondary stacks are
allocated).