karl@grebyn.com (Karl Nyberg) (11/18/88)
Some people missed the first part of this discussion because the gateway between the two worlds (it being left as an exercise to the reader to determine which is the Evil Empire, and which is not...) appears to have had some problems. At the risk of restarting the discussion back at square one, here's the early message. -- Karl -- Written 3:46 pm Oct 28, 1988 by billwolf@hubcap.UUCP > From article <248@cui.UUCP>, by bertrand@cui.UUCP (IBRAHIM Bertrand): > I am currently using Verdix Ada Development System (VADS 5.5) on SUN 3/50 > and 3/60 machines. Our site is running SunOS 3.5 and might soon move to > SunOS 4.0. Our local vendor told us that they didn't have yet any Ada > environment running under SunOS 4.0. Is this correct? > > Since we intend to buy some new licences, are there other vendors selling > Ada environments running under SunOS 4.0? The Telesoft people have what looks like a wonderful product; we here at Clemson are evaluating it for our Suns running 4.0. Telesoft has an extremely good compiler interface (windows, electronic buttons for the mouse to click on, etc); their debugger does not look quite as strong, though. They have a profiler and automatic recompilation facilities. Also, the optimization facilities in their latest release result in code which, if Telesoft's benchmarks are believable, result in code which runs faster than the code produced by current C compilers. They also exhibited the code generated by the Verdix Ada product (about 35 instructions) at Tri-Ada '88, contrasting it with the mere three instructions generated under total optimization mode by their product, for one particular (no doubt strategically selected) benchmark. The Telesoft people, apparently highly confident of the quality of their product, invited me to the Telesoft User's Group meeting; I found great praise for Telesoft's customer support, and no gripes whatsoever. About the only thing I could find at all to pick on regarding Telesoft is that their debugger was apparently left in a bare-bones condition while personnel were diverted to the mission of creating a compiler which could out-optimize C compilers; it looks like they've declared victory now and started to focus more attention on enhancing the debugger. Alsys has a product which has a very nice debugger interface, but unfortunately is not very crash-proof; for example, any attempt to examine an object which is locally declared within a package initialization will crash the debugger. The AdaWorld compiler environment is OK, but it really could have used some of the pull-down menus, etc., which were incorporated into the AdaProbe debugger -- a very nice product, if only it didn't itself need debugging!!! The Verdix people claimed that their product did run on SunOS 4.0; however, Verdix seems to take user-hostility to new heights. Their claim to be "integrated into the Unix environment" seems to carry the hidden caveat "By the way, you *do* like keyboard commands, just as cryptic as we can possibly make them?"; in view of the vastly superior user interfaces provided by Alsys and Telesoft, the Verdix product was quickly rejected.