Re: Personality Conflict was: why Ada is so unpopular ?

[David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004 14:11:00 -0600, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> And certainly, complaining about bugs in a "free" product is
> counter-productive. You get what you pay for, and if you want bugs fixed in
> a timely manner, you need to pay (someone) for that service. Otherwise, you
> are hoping that some paying customer runs into the same problem - and there
> is no guarentee of that.

If I have a bug in GCC, it generally gets fixed in a timely manner. If
it's important enough, a patch may get backported from the mainline
to the release branch by Debian developers (which is purely a volunteer
position.) To me, submitting a bug to a developer is a courtesy; it's
usually easy to work around the bug then write up a good bug report, but
writing up a bug report means a better program for everyone.

Now, I've submitted several bugs on GNAT. They've got dismissed offhand;
the one that would have required significant work, or documentation of the
limitation in the manual got neither, and Robert Dewar (who commented
personally on it) has publically claimed that the feature it used (UTF-8
source code) has never been used. The other, which was a regression, got
closed because the regression probably occurred in the C part of the
compiler. 

There are no maintainers for the Ada part of GCC that have any motivation
to keep the Ada part of GCC working for everyone, unlike the Apple, Red
Hat and Debian maintainers who work to keep the rest of the compiler
generally usable. ACT only really cares about the compiler it sends to its
clients, and it shows.

> And certainly, complaining about bugs in a "free" product is
> counter-productive. 

The fact is, it's not. If I find a bug in the C, C++, Eiffel, or Lisp
compilers on my system, or one of hundreds of other programs, I will get a
polite response. That doesn't mean I will get a bug fix, but I can't
afford to pay for a guaranteed bug fix, and probably won't ever. If I
can't get the same service from my Ada compiler as I do from my C
compiler, that is a valid reason to change languages.