Re: Ada, the best language with the not-so-best tool chain

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

On Sun, 7 Oct 2012 10:34:51 -0700 (PDT), Patrick wrote:

> I wanted to use it for embedded design(as in baremetal) but no free of
> cost version lets me do that.

Why would you expect that? I mean the evaluation board, BSP, C cross
compiler, they are not free. Why Ada compiler should be?

> There is a new driver tutorial out for Minix3 and I was thinking about
> writing a driver but I can't do that either. There is no gnat on Minix and
> you can't cross compile for minix from Windows/Linux etc.. so I don't know
> how to get ada on it...

Ask AdaCore or switch to VxWorks. Neither would be for free, of course.
 
> No solution will be easy but I was hoping to start a hypothetical discussion on solutions.
> 
> For instance:
> 
> 1)If we had a Ada runtime written in C, then we could cross compile with GCC as-is no?

No
 
> 2)ASM is not really portable but surely some flavours must be, If we had a
> converter, we could cross compile at the ASM stage no?

No
 
> I have only two :(
>
> Does anyone have some more ideas?

3) Don't buy any hardware for which there is no Ada compiler. It is
economically infeasible unless you are going to ship thousands of boards.
In the latter case, you would have enough funding to order a BSP and an Ada
compiler for it.

There is a mental block most people have. They see only the hardware,
assuming software kind of non-essential. But the costs of software
developing, testing and maintenance are far bigger than ones of the
hardware. Except for hard physical constraints (e.g. power consumption,
weight, durability etc), hardware choice is subordinate.

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