Re: Porting GNAT to Debian Hurd

["B. Douglas Hilton" <doug.hilton@engineer.com>]

I don't know if Hurd is ripe for a takeover, but it would probably
not be excessively difficult to fork the development tree at this
stage.
    I was looking at the gnat sources, and it appears that you need
to already have an older gnat installed to build a newer one. This
might be tricky for Hurd, because I'd have to cross-compile gnat
from Linux, then use it to do a native build in Hurd.
    To do that, I need to compile gnat in a cross-compilation
configuration in Linux; it would be a minor feat, but is theoretically
possible.
    A good start for an Ada kernel would be to rewrite oskit in Ada,
possibly in a very stripped-down configuration. Now that would
be pretty cool.

- Doug


Ted Dennison wrote:

> One of my occasional daydreams involves an OS getting "taken over" by Ada as
> more and more of its apps are written using it. That would lead to
> device-drivers, which would eventually lead to Ada starting to seep into the
> kernel sources. Finally the remainder of the kernel would just get rewritten in
> Ada to make things more consistent (and maintainable).
>
> Hurd's at a good place for such a takeover, but I don't think Ada is yet. We
> just don't quite have the volunteer manpower.
>
> ---
> T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
>           home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com