From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,976a050e0f89277c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Corey Minyard Subject: Re: Urgent question: malloc and ada... Date: 1998/05/02 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 349541197 Sender: minyard@wf-rch.cirr.com References: <352A79C2.15FB7483@nathan.gmd.de> <1998Apr30.180141.1@eisner> Organization: Wonderforce Research Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-05-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes: > > Perhaps that is because the distinguished contributor lives in the real > world, and not a wishful-thinking world! In practice the definition > expressed here is a useful one, since of course it is almost always > the case that the operating system involved will have substantial > chunks written in C (probably it won't be 100% C, there will be C++, > and perhaps assembly .....) The Linux kernel is almost all C with some assembly (mostly in inline asm statements, startup code, and kernel trap code). Linus tried to convert to compiling with C++, but he got so much flak he changed it back. For real-time Linux, there is some support for loading C++ modules. > > It would be a nice excercise to rewrite the Linux kernel in Ada, and indeed > the comparison of the effort involved, and the final results would make > an interesting student research paper. This is by no means an out of scope > effort. The core of the kernel is not a gigantic program. The core of the kernel is not itself gigantic, but add networking code and device drivers and it gets pretty big. The Linux 2.1.98 sources are about 11MB compressed. It would be a big job to rewrite the whole thing. Although we can always hope :-). In reality, the Linux kernel is finely tuned and very robust; so much optimization effort has gone into it that reproducing it in Ada would likely produce bad results that would make Ada look bad. It would be nice to be able to support Ada for real-time Linux modules, though. Maybe someday I'll look at that... -- Corey Minyard Internet: minyard@acm.org Work: minyard@nortel.ca UUCP: minyard@wf-rch.cirr.com