Re: Interfacing Ada with C

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:08:09 -0700 (PDT), Ada novice wrote:

> On Jul 26, 4:52�pm, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:40:49 -0700 (PDT), Ada novice wrote:
> 
>>> Would you be kind enough to elaborate on your above comments a little
>>> more?
>>
>> Project IMSL as written does not describe any entity to build. It does a
>> subcomponent of such an entity, like the test project, which defines an
>> executable. An executable can be built, a component cannot.
>>
>> When bindings are mature and need to be redistributed, deployed, become a
>> part of some large project like Linux distribution with it specific
>> requirements etc, there is a need to pack the bindings code into a
>> pre-built library, static, shared or both. A project that describes such a
>> library is compilable, because a library has to be built. A library would
>> most likely have at least two different projects:
>>
>> 1. compilable "implementation" used by the library developer to build the
>> library from the sources.
>>
>> 2. non-compilable "interface" for library users who use the built library
>> in their projects. They don't need to compile the sources. They will use
>> *.ads, *.ali, *.lib/a files instead.
>>
>> A good thing about Ada and gnatmake/grpbuid is that it is fairly simple to
>> do these things compared with the horrific make/configure.
> 
> Thanks. But the library would not be portable to another machine as we
> need more than the file imslcmath_dll.lib . IMSL runs because it's
> on my Windows environment path.

For deployment of the run-time you need a DLL, assuming that
imslcmath_dll.lib is an import library of.

The library build project is about how to create such a library from your
code if you are not going to distribute the sources.

> As an engineer in another field, it's hard to grasp all that you're
> saying but I hope with time I'll understand better :). Can you
> recommend books/publications that discuss similar ideas that you have
> been mentioning?

You may not believe it, but the GNAT User's Guide describes most, if not
all of that:

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gnat_ugn_unw

(Software engineers used to say, if nothing else helped, try to read the
manual... (:-))

You can also read this one to get the idea of Ada software distribution in
the form libraries. It is actually for Linux, but Ada is OS-agnostic:

http://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy.html

Specifically everything about GNAT project files:

http://www.adacore.com/wp-content/files/auto_update/gprbuild-docs/html/gprbuild_ug.html

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de