From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,1199d1e5f439a57b,start X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!ei5g2000vbb.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: jrmarino Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: [ANN] FreeBSD now has Ada cross-compilers for ARM/Android Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:17:31 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <2aa7115c-b2cc-468e-9330-1b4799615322@ei5g2000vbb.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 90.38.41.170 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1311455851 20119 127.0.0.1 (23 Jul 2011 21:17:31 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:17:31 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: ei5g2000vbb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=90.38.41.170; posting-account=Zsf4jwoAAADEqwCydv835KU9-S3h_Y26 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-Google-Web-Client: true X-Google-Header-Order: HNKRUAELSC X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.112 Safari/534.30,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20331 Date: 2011-07-23T14:17:31-07:00 List-Id: Way back in January I proved it was possible to run binaries on Android that were written in Ada and compiled with GNAT-AUX (FSF variant). Since then, I haven't done much because all I had was the Android SDK emulator which is very slow, very limited, and only supports the ARMv5 architecture. I was waiting to obtain real hardware to continue, and that is still probably a few weeks away. I wanted to run the full ACATS and gnat-dg tests on the cross-compiler to characterize how true it is. However, a few days ago, I picked it back up and built "Textris" on it, and discovered a small problem with tasking. That has since been resolved, and I wrote a little blog article on it: http://www.dragonlace.net/posts/FreeBSD64-Android_cross-compiler_builds_Tetris_with_Tasking/ This weekend, I wrote four "ports" for FreeBSD. This allows any FreeBSD user (i386 or amd64) to build their own Ada cross-compiler (ARMv5 or ARMv7). Another blog article explains how to do it: http://www.dragonlace.net/posts/GNATDroid_cross-compiler_ports_created_for_FreeBSD/ It would be a nice project for someone to blaze the trail on writing Native Android phone/table applications without any Java. This is possible from Android 2.3 onwards using the "NativeActivity" functionality provided with the Android Native Development Kit (NDK). The API require C bindings, but it shouldn't be too difficult. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/NativeActivity.html As for getting these binaries on the device itself, it appears that the http://bsdroid.org project has unfortunately stalled, so if the use of "adb" is needed, you might have to resort to using Linux, Mac, or Windows and installing the Android SDK on them. A better way may to root the device and put an ssh daemon on it and just scp the files directly on it. Once I run these compilers through the testsuite and am satisfied with the outcome, I'll submit these ports for inclusing into the FreeBSD ports repository. It would be great to see some folks build on my work here, and I apologize for sitting on this for 6 months. Regards, John