Re: Ada 95 based RTOS

[rracine@myremarq.com (Roger Racine)]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000 20:14:11 GMT, xaplos@my-deja.com wrote:

>My intentions are not to bad-talk Ada in any way - I'm already convinced
>its a superior language than C/C++. Your absolutely right in that the
>specific requirements for any project (especially an RTOS project)
>rarely can be met with an off-the-shelf product. It's just nice to have
>some source code available as a reference (especially as a newbie to
>Ada) when beginning a new project rather than starting from scratch.
>
>There are several books available on embedded programming that discuss
>C/C++ which is really nice for a beginning programming to use as a
>starting reference. Even though these books probably won't discuss the
>particulars of your project, it's still a nice reference. I just think
>having access to Ada sources for low level system programming - like an
>RTOS - will help beginners like myself become more familiar with the
>capabilities of Ada.
>
>I'm planning on devoting about a 1 to 2 years (probably will be much
>more but my wife will kill me if I don't get out of school soon) working
>on an open-source OS written entirely in Ada for wireless devices
>(similar to the Palm OS, Windows CE, Epoc OS, etc.). I'd like the entire
>project to be based on Ada from the low-level kernel and memory
>management all the way to the programming API and GUI. I strongly
>believe Ada is a perfect language for these types of consumer appliances
>for obvious reasons. I don't expect to find any RTOS that will meet my
>all of my requirements for this project; however, having access to the
>Ada sources for RTEMS would be a great starting point.
>

A company called TopLayer (www.toplayer.com) has a RTOS based on the
GNAT runtime system.  Mike Kamrad of that company has given a couple
talks at Ada conferences on the subject.  

I am not sure about the license issues.  Their code has "all rights
reserved", but it was based on the GNAT source.  The GNAT source has
pretty open language, but definitely -not- GPL (since it is expected
to be used as a library), so the TopLayer code does not appear to be
"open by extension".

Roger Racine