Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

<<The development of the ia64 port (IMHO) was severely limited by the NDAs
that were forced on the developers by Intel and others.
>>

NDA's should not be permitted in this environment

<<Yes.  But gdb5 was a lot more open than anything related to Ada has
ever been and GDB development continues to become more open.
>>

Actually I don't think this is true, the period between some of the
developments and them seeing the light of day for gdb5 was comparably
long or longer than the period between GNAT releases.

We actually have no objection to more frequent GNAT releases, the reason
this is not done now is simply that it is a lot of effort. We are assuming
that once there is an open tree, it will be easier for us to provide more
frequent patches, fixes and developments, and easier for others to take
advantage of them.

In particular, the open tree will of course be more source oriented, whereas
most current users of the public version of GNAT are interested in turnkey
packaged binary builds, rather than building for themselves (especially
since most of the interest is on NT, where building is especially tricky).
What would be nice is if we see people building and making binary
releases more frequently, but that's quite an effort, and I am not sure
it is something that will easily happen just through volunteer effort (the
GNAT-for-DOS effort foundered quite a bit).

Anyway, it seems to me that the right steps are to work as quickly as
possible to get the GNAT sources integrated into the gcc tree, and
then try to work towards the goal of keeping the open tree as well
syncrhonized as possible with our internal development.

We are currently working to stabilize the current set of sources to
make a new release, 3.14, and as soon as this is ready for beta release,
which should be very shortly now, we will make these sources available.
We also have to resolve some remaining issues of the integration with
GCC 2.9x, but that work is also coming along very well.