Re: Verdix VADS ADA or GNU ADA on an SGI...

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Ted is basically accurate in his assessment of GNAT (I am pleased to hear
that he has managed to gte it to work for him). Just one amendment is that
the tasking is available on some other platforms besides Suns, and in 
particular, the tasking will be available on several other machines including
the SGI very shortly.

An important factor in risk mitigation with using early versions of GNAT is
indeed to be careful about what features you use. GNAT itself has been using
nothing but GNAT to compile itself for over 15 months, and we have found
it to be a VERY reliable compiler, but we certainly don't use some of the
more difficult aspects of Ada (complex private types, aggregates, complex
variant records etc), which helps to account for our good experience.

It's certainly early to be using GNAT for mission critical stuff, but a
number of projects have done, and are doing so successfully already, and
each new version of GNAT improves the stability and completeness
substantially (keep those bug reports coming in!)