New GNAT IDE Released

McDoobie writes "Ada Core Technologies has released their new GPS Integrated Development Environment for download. It's intended to be a professional-grade development environment along the lines of Microsoft Visual C++ or Sun's Forte. You can grab it at http://libre.act-europe.fr/gps/. Check it out. You might like it."

Comments

whoops

[Anonymous Coward]

"C/C++ support is not complete"

A natural Visual C++ competitor!

wow, finally!

[RedDork]

If only we had this when I was an undergraduate learning to program on Ada. Instead we were thrown into the mysteries of vi and ADA at the same time, with no hint of the existence of such a thing as an IDE or even a text editor that behaved in some way related to what we were used to. Nothing like learning to program on a language that won't let you compile if you have a few spaces in the wrong place, and a text editor that is even more baffling at first glance. My lab TA thought I was a natural programmer since I was always done first. In actuality, I was the first person to figure out that we had ftp access and to download then damn files and edit it on windows . I'm sorry, but vi never made any sense to me. Maybe that's why I'm in law school now

Re:wow, finally!

[slowdive1979]

actually, it's not too poor of a programming language, at least as of Ada95 it wasn't. it's fairly tolerant of white space and is not case sensitive. it protects you from going outside arrays and similar programming glitches that are easy to miss and easily crash your program. it also handles multi-threaded programs very easily. finally, if there is something you want to do at a low level, or if you want to use C, it's fairly easy to turn off the protections or import a chunk of code.

as far as editing goes, i always used emacs. with a decently configured lisp file, it will format the text according to what part of the program you are in or whether or a word is a variable or a command or what not. or there was the windows program adagide, which did all of this as well. i guess it's all in what you are used to, and what tool are at your disposal. :wq

Wow...

[Randolpho]

Lots of nifty features.I especially like the version control options (not just CVS, but several others, apparently), the program entities graph, and the call graph. Very nifty tools; if only I could get them on eclipse! :)

Re:Don't forget Dev-C++

[leifm]

I like Dev-C++ a lot. I am taking C++ in school this semester and have been using it because I have no access to VC++ at work, and it's great. Actually as far as I can tell if you aren't doing C++ dev that is Windows specific there would be no reason to choose VC++ over Dev-C++.

Re:Don't forget Dev-C++

[__past__]

For some reason, I doubt that Dev-C++, "a full-featured IDE for Win32" would be a good alternative when you are looking for a cross-platform Ada IDE.

Can it edit/understand VHDL?

[PaulBu]

... after all, syntactically VHDL is an Ada derivative.

It would be an interesting thing for them to
expand into an open-source VHDL design tool.

Remember, now for a $100-$200 one can buy an FPGA
evaluation board from, say, Xilinx, they would
give you a (closed-source, I guess) compiler to
compile from VHDL to an FPGA bin file, you load
that into the board through a parport and here it
is, fully custom electronic gadget!

Paul B.

Re:Can it edit/understand VHDL?

[McDoobie]

I beleive Ada Core Technologies does provide tools for some aspects of VHDL design. I think thier commercial GPS offering has tools that support this. I'm not certain though. You'd have to e-mail them for specifics.

GPS does offer extensive support for controlling the details of the compile/link process, which I assume is important for the VHDL arena.

McDoobie