Re: Why do so many companies use Apex?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <yecpuf2c1hf.fsf@king.cts.com>, Keith Thompson says...
>
>"Corey Ashford" <x@y.com> writes:
>[...]
>> of a record in a spec.  In Apex, only those units which
>> use the record definition will be recompiled, whereas in most
>> other compilers (and I assume including GNAT), the compilation
>> system will cause all units that "with" the spec of that package
>> containing the record definition to be recompiled because
>> more than just comments or white space has changed.
>
>It would be interesting to see a cost-benefit analysis for this kind
>of thing -- in particular, whether the time saved by avoiding major
>rebuilds outweighs the time spent in bookkeeping.

It would surely have to be plotted against program size. For a smallish program,
recompilations don't take that long, and would typically involve a significant
percentage of the entire project anyway. So taking extra effort on each file to
possibly prevent one or two more package recompilations would clearly not be a
good idea. But once you get into the thousands of packages and millions of lines
of code, where a full system compile can easly take more than 30 minutes on a
modern processor, this would be a *big* issue. 

Just another example of how Apex targets large projects.

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