Ada on FreeBSD?

Ada on FreeBSD?

[Maciej Sobczak]

What is your experience with Ada on FreeBSD?

I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
impressive than that of Debian.

If you are using Ada on FreeBSD, what is your general perception of
the toolchain integration and portability? What is the extent of your
use of Ada on this system? Do you use GtkAda there? AWS?

And so on - any feedback welcome.

One might have an impression that FreeBSD is somewhat abandoned by the
Ada community (even on this group there were only few posts during the
last decade), but with closer look things might not be so bad.

--
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Thomas Løcke]

On 2010-11-25 23:14, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> What is your experience with Ada on FreeBSD?
>
> I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
> includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
> impressive than that of Debian.
>
> If you are using Ada on FreeBSD, what is your general perception of
> the toolchain integration and portability? What is the extent of your
> use of Ada on this system? Do you use GtkAda there? AWS?
>
> And so on - any feedback welcome.
>
> One might have an impression that FreeBSD is somewhat abandoned by the
> Ada community (even on this group there were only few posts during the
> last decade), but with closer look things might not be so bad.


I don't have any personal experience with Ada on FreeBSD, but this might
be of interest to you:  http://www.dragonlace.net/

-- 
Regards,
Thomas L�cke

Email: tl at ada-dk.org
Web: http:ada-dk.org
IRC nick: ThomasLocke

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Nomen Nescio]

> > I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
> > includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
> > impressive than that of Debian.

I didn't see the original post so I am responding to this one.

Last time I looked, Ada was not buildable on the AMD64 (x86_64) port of
FreeBSD. If you want to use Ada under FreeBSD you will have to know quite a
lot about building gcc under FreeBSD or you will have to run the x86 (32
bit) version of FreeBSD where the port does build properly. And you should
not assume just because a port is listed in the tree that it will build, or
build on your architecture, until you actually build the port and test
it. More than once I have tried to build a port on FreeBSD AMD64 only to
have it die halfway through the build. Contacting the maintainer I got
something like "oh yeah I know it doesn't work on AMD64". Caveat emptor.

It's all about whether someone who uses the architecture you want works
with the port you want. There is certainly nobody as interested in Ada on
various BSD OS or Solaris OS or Linux distros who is as committed as
Ludovic, but that doesn't mean you can't use Ada anywhere but Debian. But
you are likely to have the best results on the most common (x86, 32bit)
ports of various BSD just because they have the most people using them at
the moment. The BSD guys are generally not hardware freaks and are happy to
continue running old junkers years after everybody else has thrown them in
the trash bin.

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> wrote:

> Last time I looked, Ada was not buildable on the AMD64 (x86_64) port
> of FreeBSD.

I seem to remember a recent discussion on the #Ada IRC channel on
Freenode, which indicated that somebody had solved this problem.  My log
files indicate that the relevant individuals are "marino" and
"tkoskine".

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Preserve wildlife, pickle a duck."

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Tero Koskinen]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2010 19:20:58 +0100 Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> wrote:
> 
> > Last time I looked, Ada was not buildable on the AMD64 (x86_64) port
> > of FreeBSD.
> 
> I seem to remember a recent discussion on the #Ada IRC channel on
> Freenode, which indicated that somebody had solved this problem.  My log
> files indicate that the relevant individuals are "marino" and
> "tkoskine".

Marino has made i386 and x86_64 (amd64) GCC/GNAT 4.6 binaries for
DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. They can be found from
http://www.dragonlace.net/

I have made GCC/GNAT 4.3 ports/binaries for OpenBSD/i386 and
OpenBSD/amd64.

In addition, GNUAda project has OpenBSD ports for Ahven 1.8, AWS 2.3,
AdaControl 1.7, ASIS 2007, and GtkAda 2.10. And my OpenBSD ports for
AVR-Ada can be found from bitbucket.org/tkoskine:
 http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/avr-gcc
 http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/avr-ada-rts
 http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/avr-ada-lib

This AVR-Ada stuff is something what cannot be found as ports/packages
from Linux distributions or other BSDs. (Ok, my ports are pretty
incomplete also, so I haven't made much noise about them.)

> Greetings,
> 
> Jacob

-- 
Tero Koskinen - http://iki.fi/tero.koskinen/

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Kulin Remailer]

Thanks!

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Anonymous]

The other thing I would suggest when deciding whether any OS has the
necessary support packages available for Ada is to install the OS in a
VM. You will save yourself alot of headaches that way, if you don't have a
room full of PC's to test on.

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Ludovic Brenta]

Maciej Sobczak wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> What is your experience with Ada on FreeBSD?
>
> I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
> includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
> impressive than that of Debian.

In case that matters to you, you don't have to choose between Debian
and FreeBSD; you can have both at the same time with Debian GNU/
kFreeBSD[1].  All Debian packages are supported on i386 and amd64.

[1] http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Frédéric Praca]

> What is your experience with Ada on FreeBSD?
Quite good ;-)
 
> I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
> includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
> impressive than that of Debian.
In fact, only lang/gnat port is necessary to run a standard GNAT 
toolchain.
 
> If you are using Ada on FreeBSD, what is your general perception of the
> toolchain integration and portability? What is the extent of your use of
> Ada on this system? Do you use GtkAda there? AWS?
I don't really see what you mean by toolchain integration but once the 
port is installed, the toolchain is functional without any further 
manipulation.
About GtkAda, the problem is different. I tested it long time ago but 
after installing the port, I decided to compile it from scratch.


> And so on - any feedback welcome.
> 
> One might have an impression that FreeBSD is somewhat abandoned by the
> Ada community (even on this group there were only few posts during the
> last decade), but with closer look things might not be so bad.
The only problem I ran to was mith the compilation of the toolchain for 
MarteOS but that's a different story :D

Fred

Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[xavier grave]

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Hash: SHA1

Le 25/11/2010 23:14, Maciej Sobczak a �crit :
> What is your experience with Ada on FreeBSD?
> 
> I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
> includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
> impressive than that of Debian.
> 
> If you are using Ada on FreeBSD, what is your general perception of
> the toolchain integration and portability? What is the extent of your
> use of Ada on this system? Do you use GtkAda there? AWS?

I'm using Ada under Debian/kFreeBSD as a Debian Maintainer. It runs
quite well as far as I remember. May be some glitch at the beginning of
the port of some packages...

One (out of topic ?) remark : on the same hardware, the data acquisition
software was running "better" (from a data flow point of view) on the
kFreeBSD version than on Linux (comparisons values lost somewhere on my
hard disk), may be this should raise some interest for this target for
those who are looking for performances ?

> And so on - any feedback welcome.
> 
> One might have an impression that FreeBSD is somewhat abandoned by the
> Ada community (even on this group there were only few posts during the
> last decade), but with closer look things might not be so bad.
> 
> --
> Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com
> 

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Re: Ada on FreeBSD?

[Ludovic Brenta]

xavier grave writes:
> Le 25/11/2010 23:14, Maciej Sobczak a écrit :
>> What is your experience with Ada on FreeBSD?
>> 
>> I have found a couple of relevant packages, the ports collection even
>> includes GNAT GPL 2010, but certainly the coverage is much less
>> impressive than that of Debian.
>> 
>> If you are using Ada on FreeBSD, what is your general perception of
>> the toolchain integration and portability? What is the extent of your
>> use of Ada on this system? Do you use GtkAda there? AWS?
>
> I'm using Ada under Debian/kFreeBSD as a Debian Maintainer. It runs
> quite well as far as I remember. May be some glitch at the beginning of
> the port of some packages...
>
> One (out of topic ?) remark : on the same hardware, the data acquisition
> software was running "better" (from a data flow point of view) on the
> kFreeBSD version than on Linux (comparisons values lost somewhere on my
> hard disk), may be this should raise some interest for this target for
> those who are looking for performances ?

In the same vein I'd like to recount my own success story with Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD.  I had an old laptop (IBM ThinkPad T22, made in 2001) that
would no longer boot Linux, probably due to some fault in the hardware.
Even the Linux on the Debian installer disk, or that on the System
Rescue CD, would not boot; the laptop was essentially bricked.  I then
burned a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD install disk and it booted and installed on
that old hardware without a glitch, giving a third life (Debian
GNU/Linux was already its second life) to this old machine.  That same
day I sent an email to Aurelien Jarno, thanking him for creating Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD.

That old laptop still has all the Ada packages installed on it, BTW.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.