Re: Porting Ada code to Linux

[Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>]

On 31 Oct 2006 06:17:46 -0800, I waved a wand and this message
magically appears in front of Bill:

> We have some code (about 60K lines) that was written for use on the
> Win95 platform as a collection of DLLs.  We are now in the process of
> porting the parent application to Linux and would like to reuse the
> Ada code.  The legacy code was written using the Aonix ObjectAda
> compiler/IDE and references packages like Win32 and Win32.Windef.
> 
> We have been able to move the code over to the Linux side and compile
> using the GNU Ada compiler.  However, to get this far we also had to
> copy the aforementioned "Win" packages over too.  Clearly, this seems
> like the wrong thing to do, but it did get the compile to work.  The
> problem is that we are receiving a fair number of linker errors that
> seem to point to the file winbase.h.
> 
> So, it seems like there should be a Linux equivalent of Win32, but we
> have not been able find it.  Can anyone point us to a replacement for
> these packages that will make the compiler AND the linker happy?  Is
> there anything else we should know about in our effort to complete
> this port?

The problem here is that you have no-one inhouse who knows anything
about Linux. Otherwise you would have been told a rewrite would be the
best thing to do. 

It's probably too late now, but can I suggest tasking someone with
rewriting the Win32 packages as a emulation layer? 

You could probably recoup the costs by selling the Win32 emulation
libraries to others porting to Unix from Windows...
-- 
http://www.munted.org.uk

You've been eating the cat food again, haven't you?