I'm doing a trade study for Ada development on Linux. Do you have any good compiler/OS recommendations?
So far, I've got GNAT from AdaCore running on CentOS 5.4, and I have license requests in for Rational Apex and Aonix ObjectAda.
This is a porting effort. The original codebase is Apex 3.0 on OSF1 4.0d.
Anything else I should be considering? Ideally, it would be a supported environment.
One issue you need to take into consideration is to determine to what degree your system that's being ported utilizes vendor-supplied packages to perform its function. What I've seen with older, large systems, especially Apex ones, is a propensity for the language gurus during its development time to have decided that vanilla Ada just wasn't good enough, and so tie into all these vendor-supplied packages. If that's what your system does right now, it's a strong argument for upgrading within the vendor and sticking with Apex (all other things being mostly equal).
Whenever I've done ports of such systems, if given the opportunity I've done my best to tear out all the vendor-supplied stuff--nine times out of ten replacing the vendor-specific stuff with vanilla Ada implementations worked just as well, and you no longer have to deal with the quirks of a compiler-specific package. Plus, you increase the portability and maintainability of the system, allowing it to better adapt to future changes.