Re: Ada for C30

[jfj (John Fountain, Jr.)]

gentle@cnj.digex.net (Gentle) wrote>
>=========================================================================
>gentle@cnj.digex.net  -  Finger for PGP Public Key
>Software Engineer
>Edison, NJ

>=========================================================================
We are in the process of beginning to use Tartan Ada for the C40.  Our experiences have been
VERY limited but interesting.  It appears that, given you compile everything just right, you
can get _close_ to TI's C language output.  By this I mean, you have to turn the correct optimizations
ON AND OFF.  We have not spent much time delving into the supporting packages from Tartan
but our initial peeks imply there is room for improvement.  We also have not gone into the ISR
writing phase at all.  This should prove to be interesting.  Overall, my intuition tells me if I could
do it in C I can do it in Tartan Ada with a little careful construction.  Probably the biggest hurdle
is that C's memory allocation are very easy to predict, while in Ada we are not always sure of what
the compiler will construct and where things will be allocated from.  I know this is mostly due
to our severe lack of experience with Ada, and conversely, with our extensive experience with C
on many platforms/targets.  They have a very nice debugger called Adascope which works
on multiprocessor DSP setups.  The hard part is getting the OS/2 server to talk to both the
Unix machine you are running Adascope on and the target system.

I am looking forward to getting deeper into C40's and Ada.  Has anyone else used Tartan Ada on
the C40 ?  Gotten aroung to implementing the Shared Memory Ada Run Time extensions ?

John Fountain, Jr.
jfj@accessnv.com