Ada "library only" compiler ?

[Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org>]

This thread could be a bit inflammatory, please bear in mind:
-I love Ada
-I've been with Ada for 7 months and I am only learning it.
-Programming is not my day job
-I slept 5 minutes last night, in a chair, in a hospital.
-I have good intentions, this is not meant to be hostile.

I spent a few minutes today going through GNAT internals. I was just planning on looking at high quality Ada code and just studying a well respected project.

I was surprised to see so much C code. I know  Ada has facilities for low level programming but it seems to be that the momentum of C hasn't allowed for Ada to grow as much as it could have in this department. It seems to me that even within GNAT, it has just been easier to piggyback on C, rather then rewrite things in Ada and ASM.

So again, I don't mean to be harsh but if we are always building on C through the GNAT compilation progress would it be logical to decouple the two to create a simple Ada "as library" compiler? It seems that we can't open a file or get a command line argument without C anyways.

Lua is called a language and has it's own file extension etc but it's developers are open about the fact that it is not a language but a C library.

Would a compiler that took this approach to the language be much smaller and simpler and perhaps make it easier to get Ada onto other devices?

So I am clueless at the moment as to how GNAT implements Tasking, OO or even the Ada type system but if I studied and eventually moved these to an Ada to ASM translator then a C boilerplate file(s) could implement what the Ada-as-a-language implementation would need to behave as a language. The C boilerplate piece would be in one place and could easily be reworked by anyone.

Just some sleep deprived daydreaming and this would take me months if not years to get done at the part time pace I would have to do it at but would it be useful if it did get done?

If I used the FSF code base rather then straight from Adacore the code could also be used to generate proprietary code at no cost like the FSF version can. I really hope it will be easier one day to write full implementation Ada embedded code for a larger number of devices then it is now.

Thanks for reading-Patrick