[Info-vax] Making the CRTL version dependency information useful

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Monday, 15 January 2018 16:19:48 UTC, Ian Miller  wrote:
> On Monday, January 15, 2018 at 2:31:54 AM UTC, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> > On 1/14/2018 8:21 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> > > On 2018-01-14, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> > >> Definitely no PL/I on VMS x86-64.
> > > 
> > > Last time I checked, we still didn't know what the situation is with
> > > Ada on x86-64 either...
> > 
> > Ada is ACT.
> > 
> > We may not know, but a guess would be that they would not port.
> > At least not until they see a significant market. I believe they
> > are cutting down on platforms not expanding.
> > 
> > Arne
> 
> There was a OpenVMS ADA from Adacore but they stopped supporting it. 
> There is this one http://www.vmsadaall.org/index.php/en/ 
> 
> I hope VSI are talking to someone about ADA as there is definitely a need for a support OpenVMS ADA compiler

Do you have a definitive reference for "they stopped supporing 
it"? There are signs from 2017 that although 'it' may have gone 
away from the AdaCore website, 'it' can still be done, with or
without involving AdaCore.

In an Ada environment the usual assumption that the development 
environment is the same as the deployment environment isn't 
always true, so customer definitions of 'it' may need to be 
clarified.

Specifically, look for a post from gérard Calliet to comp.lang.ada 
on 2 Mar 2017, titled "Gnat Ada on OpenVMS is back", where 
he talks about how Gnat Ada was used to move an existing 
VMS/Alpha/Ada application to VMS/IA64/Ada.

Marginally related: Readers interested in Ada applications on 
bare metal boxes (*truly* bare metal, not what some HYPErvisor 
people call bare metal) might be interested in this 2017 talk 
(an informative 15 minutes) from Tristan Gingold, who works 
for AdaCore, and also wrote GHDL (which probably won't mean 
much to most folk here unless they know what VHDL is):
https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/speaker/tristan_gingold/
https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/programming_rpi3/

The target Tristan chose for this brare-metal talk is RPi3 
(without Linux). Some pros and cons of his choice, and the
resulting  consequences, are briefly discussed in the 
presentation. The demo application isn't the industyy default 
"hello world" (which is actually a bit of a pain to build 
from the ground up on a previously unsupported-by-Gnat processor, 
because of the runtime library support it quietly drags in).

Interestingly given the news of the last few weeks, Tristan
mentions the importance of cacheability (or not) on device 
accesses, and the possible implications of side effects,
and how to sort out cacheability in the particular target 
environment used for his talk.

Have a lot of fun.