Emmanuel Briot has been with AdaCore between 1998 and 2017. He has been involved in a variety of projects, in particular oriented towards graphical user interfaces, including GtkAda, GPS, XML/Ada, GnatTracker and our internal CRM. He holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale des Telecommunications (Brest, France).
12 entries written by Emmanuel Briot
User friendly strings APIIn a previous post, we described the design of a new strings package, with improved performance compared to the standard Ada unbounded strings implementation. That post focused on various programming techniques used to make that package as fast as possible.
This post describes the new GNATCOLL.Strings package, and the various optimizations it performs to provide improved performance.
Customizing build target switchesIn the first post in this series (Integrate new tools in GPS) we saw how to create new build targets in GPS to spawn external tools via a menu or toolbar button, and then display the output of that tool in its own console, as well as show error messages in the Locations view.
This blog, the first in a series, explains the basic mechanisms that GPS (the GNAT Programming Studio) provides to integrate external tools. A small plugin might make your daily workflow more convenient by providing toolbar buttons and menus to spawn your tool and parse its output.
GNAT and all the tools work great on the newly released macOS Sierra, but gdb needs some tweaking of the system.
The GNAT Programming Studio support for the debugger has been enhanced. This post describes the various changes you can expect in this year's new release of GPS.
The GPS source repository has been published on GitHub. This post briefly describes how you can access it, and hopefully contribute.
As we improve existing views in GPS, we discover new ways to use them. This post shows some of the improvements done recently in the Bookmarks view, and how you can now use it as a TODO list.
This short post describes an idiom that can be used to help maintain complex hierarchies of tagged types, when methods need to call the parent types methods.
This post describes the design of a new containers library. It highlights some of the limitations of the standard Ada containers, and proposes a new approach using generic packages as formal parameters to make these new containers highly configurable at compile time.
Reference countingReference counting is a way to automatically reclaim unused memory. An element is automatically deallocated as soon as there are no more references to it in the program.
This post shows how to implement a special storage pool that allocates an extra header every time it allocates some memory. This can be used to store type specific information, outside of the type itself.