Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?)

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Wednesday, 19 March 2014 13:24:36 UTC, Peter Chapin  wrote:
> In another thread Shark8 posted a proposal to build an IDE+compiler for
> Ada 2012. In his post he notes that having a second open source compiler
> offering (besides GNAT) for Ada would be good for the Ada community.

It is, but the way he is considering it seems to hark back to the olden days of Ada compilers.

> I agree.
>
> GNAT is a fine product but it would enrich the eco-system if there were
> alternatives. Accordingly I started a pet project for myself to build an
> Ada 2012 compiler from the ground up which I'm calling "Augusta." The
> project is here:
>
>     https://github.com/pchapin/augusta

A couple of months ago I was searching the net for other Ada compilers, subsets mainly. Only ones I found were either Ada 83 (original ones) or the Ada-ish (not really a subset) from the Crafting a compiler in C book. I was searching as I was planning to build a subset of Ada 2012 (in Ada 2012 using GNAT). I actually started the code today before I heard about these two threads.

> I am not as naive as I probably sound. I fully understand that such a
> project is massive and not likely to actually ever be completed.

As long as you don't expect all the annexes, I don't see why not.

> In the meantime I've been using Augusta as a source of class examples
> and student exercises in a compiler course I'm teaching at Vermont
> Technical College. The work there has been in a sub-project called

Do you have a website with the course materials at all? Always worth a look. Why don't you set up your compiler as a means for students to add to, i.e. add floating point support, add real-time annex, etc. That would get your compiler off the ground faster and might even take less than 6 years to complete.

> Allegra which is intended to be a compiler for a series of highly

You might want to change the name as there is a project with that name already, see #Ada on Freenode.

> reduced Ada subsets with increasing complexity. In addition to

This is surely what pragma Profile and pragma Restriction are for, this is the basis of my compiler.

> Anyway, enough said... I invite anyone who is interested to browse
> around in the project. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Ok.

Luke.