Re: Building the 2021 source release of GnatStudio

["Stéphane Rivière" <stef@genesix.org>]

Le 30/07/2021 à 13:51, Emmanuel Briot a écrit :
> I must admit having a hard time understanding this discussion.

But it's a pleasure to talk with an Adacore insider :)

> There is of course no way AdaCore will change their tools to use any of the suggestions in this thread.

I didn't even think about it :)

> HAC  is 100% unknown outside of the Ada community, and I would guess 100% unknown outside of the small comp.lang.ada subset of it.

It uses a clean subset of a certain computer language we know better
than the snake :)

> At least for now, and things could possibly change in the future.

Legacy has to be handle. So I think it's too late and probably irrelevant.

> So it would make no sense to only have HAC support for instance (and
> would not remove any of the build difficulties to boot, since backward compatibility is a thing and python would
> have to be kept)

The root of the problem is (to my taste) there. Python has no place in
an IDE written in Ada.

I guess GPS/GNATStudio was written also to demonstrate that Ada can
implement any complex graphical application.

So, this is a counterproductive example that gives the image of an
incomplete or weak language having to use Python to implement a
high-level IDE with scripting capabilities.

Emacs uses Lisp, Emacs users script in Lisp (like me at one point).

GNATStudio should have used an Ada subset from the start. The effort was
not made. It is too late. Next case :)

> As the original poster mentioned, building GNATStudio is a very difficult thing. Just like building Firefox, or I presume Visual Studio,

That's, to my taste, definitly not a valuable excuse :)

I builded GVD (the GNATStudio ancestor) a breeze, almost 20 years ago.
Then came GPS, with ton of C inside (nearly 30% due to Berkely DB
embedded at this time) and a "unmakeable" make process :>

> is no secret documentation that they do not want to publish to the outside)

No secret documentation ? Okay. So I need it for Linux :) A full
GNATStudio build script with instructions, please :) As I don't believe
Adacore engineers keep this complex knowledge in their heads...

Anyway, it seems to me that the latest versions of GNATStudio are better
finished and the whole thing is a really nice tool to use.

All the best for you and Adacore team