Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Dmitry A.Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message news:<ajt1ae$1ebok8$1@ID-77047.news.dfncis.de>...
> Yes, it looked to me as if neither you nor other vendors are convinced that 
> [strange] ARM platform will have any considerable success. Your answer 
> shows that it is true, at least in case of ACT. Exactly this is strange 
> from my perspective. There are lots of Ada ports for PowerPC, there is one 
> even for a radiation-hardened something (:-)). And there is no one for ARM. 
> At the same time no less than 80% of the customers we are dealing with, are 
> using or are planing to use ARM.

We are not in the guessing game, and also not in the business of
believing
those who say without hard evidence that platform xxx will be
important for
Ada. It's quite simple, if we have some real customers who are
seriously interested, then a port will appear. There is some sign that
this may happen
for the ARM, but nothing definite enough to announce yet :-)

> Yes of course. However note that almost none of our customers will ever 
> show any interest. They know nothing about Ada and even less about ACT.

OK, so your customers are indeed irrelevant to us. And therefore what
they
do or do not plan to do is not significant. Yes, sure I know there are
those
who say "you should make a port for xxx, maybe that will generate
interest".
Well that kind of speculation is not for us, but the nice thing about
an
open technology like GNAT is that if someone thinks that, and is
confident
that Ada Core Technologies is missing the boat, then there is nothing
stopping
anyone from building the missing port :-)

> I can undestand that Java platform is not so damn promising to support 
> JGNAT. But just out of curiosity, does ACT really believe that ARM will 
> never ever used as an embedded platform? What is ACT expectance of sharing 
> the embedded market between PowerPC, x86 and ARM? X:Y:0?

The embedded market in general does not necessarily reflect likely Ada
usage.
Right now, most embedded Ada work is either on the power PC or the 68K
with
some limited amount of x86 work.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies