Cross-Compiling Ada to Netware with GNAT

["darrylbleau@gmail.com" <darrylbleau@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

Exploring using Ada as a replacement language for C, however, one of
our requirements is that we need to be able to run our programs on
Novell Netware. So, one of the first aspects of the feasilbility study
is to get an Ada program running on Netware. We've been so far
unsuccessful, so I was hoping someone here could help point us in the
right direction.

Currently, we cross compile our C programs using gcc and link
everything into an elf32-i386 object file. Then, we use nlmconv to
convert this into an NLM (Netware's executable format). So, we tried
this approach to cross compile Ada programs, linking the object file
that gnatmake generated together with libgnat.a and libgcc_eh.a.
However, nlmconv errors out with an 'invalid operation' and lists
missing symbols related to C, this seems to be from using the wrong
header files (using the Linux headers, not the Netware ones), so we're
missing 'stdout and stdin' among others. Netware, of course, won't run
the generated NLM.

I've only been researching Ada for about a month in my spare time, but
everyplace I read can't stop talking about how portable it is, so I'm
thinking there must be an easy way to make this work, I'm just not sure
how. I did read about compiling a compiler on the target platform
itself and using this to compile programs with, is that the direction I
should be taking instead of cross compiling? Though it would seem that
you should be able to cross compile to any gcc supported platform (of
which Netware is). In any event, I'm at a bit of a loss, can anyone
help?