Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[kingdon@harvey.cyclic.com (Jim Kingdon)]

> I guess I am not convinced that freeware, although certainly useful, is
> anything I would normally choose to bet my project on.  Gnu C seems to be
> the sole exception.  And, development of industrial-strength tool suites
> requires industrial-strength cashflow.

Well, perhaps one of the reasons that GNU C seems solid is that it
*does* have a significant amount of cashflow behind it.  Cygnus is
doing well, thank you very much (I don't know if they've published any
numbers, but if you look at press releases, job openings, etc. on
http://www.cygnus.com that should give you an idea).  And this is
quite relevant to GNAT--large parts of the compiler, including most
optimizations, all code generation, etc., are common between the Ada,
C, and C++ front-ends.

How to quantify the value of the work being done by people not at
Cygnus and ACT is harder, but even if you assume that value is zero,
lots of effort is still going into the GNU compiler.