Re: Ada compiler for Windows NT

[slinky.cs.nyu.edu!slinky.cs.nyu.edu!nobody@nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Alsys has certainly announced its intentions in this area (I hope I am not
giving away company secrets by saying that the intentions are backed up by
some very nice technical work, but I don't know the release status, contact
Alsys directly). Meridian was demonstrating an NT compiler at the last 
Tri-Ada a year ago.

One thing to understand here is that there are many ways of writing a piece
of software that is nominally NT, ranging all the way from a thin warming
over of a Windows app to a full reimplemtation that takes advantage of NT.
The other thing to realize is that NT is realy a collection of operating
subsystems with a common Kernel. Usually people are talking about Win32 whn
they ask this kind of question, but you need to be sure the guy who is
answering your question is on the same wavelength.

Finally, people have asked, and will no doubt ask more energetically now,
whether there is an NT version of GNAT. The answer is that we have waited
till NT is available to even think about this, but now that I can get NT
in my local Software Etc (a bunch of $295 boxes were up on the wall), I
guess that time has come! In fact we definitely expect an NT port of GNAT,
since NT is perfectly capable of supporting GNAT. We will still concentrate
on the OS/2 version for now, since our main priority is on impleementing
additional functionality on our current ports (OS/2 and Sparc) rather than
doing new ports of what we have. Eventually of course we expect to have
lots of ports (our experience so far is that in fact it has been easy to
port what we have if you know enough about GCC to do cross-compilations,
we have in house ports to Alpha, RS-6000, HP, MIPS etc).

By the way, one of the reasons that we think the OS/2 version more significant
is that, especially with glue factory disasters, we think it likely that there
will be more PC's around with th 6 megs (8 megs really) that OS/2 requires
rather than the 16 megs (20 megs really) that NT requires!