Re: Ada (Was: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria)

[Joe Buck <jbuck at possibly dot synopsys dot com>]

> The upcoming Debian release has GNAT in it, and I believe members of
> the GNAT/Linux team are talking with various other Linux distribution
> guyes, this probably means that most GNU/Linux systems will have it
> installed by default soon.

Debian will contain GNAT, but will not install GNAT by default.
Debian has thousands of packages but the number that are installed
by default is far smaller.  Just the same, if this bundling results
in less US Gov't dollars going to a certain billionaire in Redmond,
fine with me :-).

Now, if the GNAT maintainers *want* to put GNAT into the GCC tree, because
it will make their lives easier, I won't object.  I wasn't sure whether
Richard Kenner really wanted to do that.  Given that uncertainty, I
certainly didn't want to make it a release criterion (the original title
of this message, remember?).

> One benefit of having the Ada front end in is that its bootstrap and
> runtime build are valuable tests of the back-end. Also, there is a
> publically available huge validation test suite for Ada (formerly
> known as ACVC), and also a performance test suite (ACES). Huge here
> means thousands of tests.
> 
> Provided that Ada Core Technologies finds it possible to integrate the
> GNAT sources in the GCC development process (not obvious), I volunteer
> to work on packaging the available Ada test suites so they can be used
> easily to test GCC (and depending on timing, for 3.0).

I'll be happy if you do that, although I'm against making a complete pass
on these test suites a requirement for the 3.0 release.  Too many
requirements means that we never ship, and in the past there has been
a certain amount of tension between requirements for Ada and requirements
for other languages.