Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

[David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 21:50:19 -0500, Stephen Leake wrote:

> As a paying customer, I get fast and excellent response from ACT. I
> have submitted many bug reports.

I'm not doubting that. 
 
>> There are two GCC frontends in risk of being dropped in the GCC 3.5
>> release because of large structural changes; Fortran 77, which has
>> no active maintainers, and Ada. The cumulative effect is that GNAT
>> is effectively unsupported, where most of the other compilers
>> (Fortran 77 excepted) are casually supported.
> 
> I don't know where you get your information; ACT says otherwise. 

In <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-01/msg00999.html>
Richard Kenner writes:

***
    > As it is today, it is impossible to build an Ada compiler with the
    > branch.

[...]

At some point in the not too distant future, the Ada front end will handle
function-at-a-time and then converting it to using tree-ssa might be
something that the tree-ssa folks can either do or help with, but I don't see
this is a major timing issue: even if we had one release of GCC (say 3.5)
that didn't support Ada, it wouldn't be fatal and should not hold up tree-ssa
if it were ready before the Ada conversion was done.

***

It's a long thread, and Robert Dewar and Richard Kenner restate that basic
point a few times.

> They
> are making it a high priority to keep the Ada in the gcc distribution
> working and up-to-date.

In <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-01/msg01970.html>
Arnaud Charlet <charlet at ACT-Europe dot FR> writes

***

[...]
Note that GCC 3.3 contains a pretty bad Ada compiler (possibly
worse than 3.2 which was not very good either), so it is not recommended
to use it for anything else than bootstrapping newer versions as
far as Ada is concerned.

***

GCC 2.95 was the first release of GCC after the EGCS branch became
mainline. There was almost four years between that release and GCC 3.3,
and they have not produced a compiler that runs on the post-EGCS code that
they consider good.

> Getting the facts is always a good idea ...

Yes, it is.