Estimates on building bindings

Estimates on building bindings

[Brad Balfour]

I was wondering if anyone had gathered any metrics on building bindings
using Intermetrics' C2Ada tool. 

Specifically I'm looking to be able to estimate the time to generate an
Ada binding to a set of C APIs. The metrics could be in the form of:
 * Source Lines of C .h code converted / hour|day|month
 * # of C "functions" converted/ hour|day|month
 * # of .h files converted/ hour|day|month

  I understand that the tool takes one only 80% or so of the way, so any
input anyone has on the amount of manual postprocessing to be done
compared to the time running the tool would also be appreciated.

Thanks for your assistance.

Brad

-- 
Brad Balfour                            SIGAda WWW Server
CACI, Inc.                                http://www.acm.org/sigada/
(703) 277-6767                          and also try:
bbalfour@std.caci.com                     http://www.adahome.com/
3930 Pender Drive     Fairfax, VA 22030
   "...they even have rules for exceptions" -- Dewar and Schonberg

Re: Estimates on building bindings

[Terry J. Westley]

Brad Balfour asks for data to help with estimating
costs of C-to-Ada conversions using c2ada:

My experience with building Ada bindings for Tcl/Tk
(http://www.ocsystems.com/xada/tash/) may not help
you much because:

a) I tried to use c2ada and abandoned it, and

b) since I was doing this on my own time, I didn't
   keep track of the time.

Why I abandoned c2ada:
======================
It did a fairly good job of converting the .h file
(my sample size was small: 1).  However, I also wanted
to produce a more Ada-friendly, shall we say, "thick"
binding.  Since a new version of Tcl/Tk comes out fairly
often, I need to track these changes and didn't want to
to hand-convert the changes into a thick binding each
time.  So, I wrote a custom C-to-Ada converter which
is specialized for the Tcl header file.  It reads the
tcl.h file and produced both thin and thick binding
packages (specs and bodies).

Didn't keep track of the time:
==============================
Since reading Humphrey's book, _Introduction_to_the_PSP_,
I now know that was a mistake.

Yes, he sold at least one book from doing his talk at
TRI-Ada, but after reading it, I realized that I should
have bought his more comprehensive, earlier book,
titled (approximately) _A_Discipline_for_Software_Engineering_.

Not much help, I know, but there it is anyway.

-- 
Terry J. Westley
twestley@acm.org
http://www.buffnet.net/~westley/
http://www.ocsystems.com/xada/tash/