Inside the Distributed Systems Annex

Laurent Pautet, Samuel Tardieu

Abstract: The current Ada revision tries as much as possible to provide the programmer with an easy way to build distributed systems; in many cases, the programmer can easily modify its monolithic application and transform it in a very short amount of time into a distributed one. However, there is a huge amount of work involved in the compiler and in external tools and libraries to build and run a distributed application without loosing Ada semantics and strong type checking. This paper describes how such a task has been achieved in the current implementation of GNAT, the GNU Ada compiler, and in GLADE, GNAT's companion package for building and running distributed programs.