Re: Newcomers to

[Brian Drummond <brian3@shapes.demon.co.uk>]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 19:47:06 +0000, Simon Clubley wrote:

> On 2014-10-10, Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@instinctive.eu> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 2014-10-09, Simon Clubley
>> <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:

>> I've recently built avr-gnat and it haven't encountered any difficulty.
>> Are you implying major issues are awaiting me further in this path?
> That's because the AVR-Ada project is a third party project and they
> have gone to a great deal of effort to support Ada on the AVR.

And their minimal RTS is quite a good basis for porting a minimal RTS for 
other small systems - not just the MSP430 but I had vague plans to use it 
for small ARMs (however, see below)

> BTW, in case you are interested, Brian Drummond has brought up an Ada
> cross compiler for the MSP430. Further information at:
> 
> 	http://sourceforge.net/p/msp430ada/wiki/Home/

Thanks for the plug. Now that the MSP430 is an official gcc target (in 
gcc4.9) I want to update it; unfortunately gcc4.9 generates significantly 
larger code than the unofficial "mspgcc" back end for 4.7, and it's 
taking a while to sort through the issues.

> I can only imagine how this looks to a newcomer to Ada especially as I
> use C for my embedded projects even when the desire is to use Ada.
> 
> In my case, the thing which really forced this issue for me was a few
> years ago when I wanted to develop a common bare metal I/O library plus
> some other code which worked across _all_ the MCUs I use or might _want_
> to use in the future. (The library has architecture neutral upper layers
> and an architecture/MCU specific lower layer.)

One piece of possibly good news : there's a LinkedIn thread where - just 
possibly - a critical mass of developers are getting together. Including 
Luke and others with some serious interest and past track record.

On this group, see the threads "Group development and porting of the RTS 
using GNAT GPL for ARM" and "http://www.AdaForMicrocontrollers.com now 
"Live". "

https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2188035&trk=anet_ug_hm

They reference a currently not-very-lively forum 
https://www.adaformicrocontrollers.com/

and a Github repo:
https://github.com/rowsail/AdaForMicrocontrollers

- Brian