Re: LLVM and Ada

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Friday, 21 October 2016 09:32:04 UTC+1, vincent....@gmail.com  wrote:

> My question precisely was not about the Ada frontend in fact but about a binding to use the LLVM from an Ada program that is a sort of compiler. I think that those who ported GNAT to LLVM should have created this kind of binding, no ?

I have looked into this and there are reasons:

1) C++ is hard to bind to, you either have to wrap the classes in C and flatten the api or use GNAT's class binding representation clauses - which isn't portable to other compilers - this may or may not matter to you.

2) There is a C binding in LLVM's source, but according to their own docs (that I cannot find right now!) say that the C interface isn't as complete as the C++ one.

3) The API changes a lot, which means it's harder to bind to.

I would look at which API you intend to bind to first to see if it can do what you need, then start by generating the bindings with "gcc -fdump-ada-spec-slim" and then hand massage them, GCC generates a ton of crap and they're not readable or compilable.

Whatever binding you create, don't release them under GPL, pick something less restrictive and other's will use them. Really annoys me when people create a binding to something and then puts them under a license the original library wasn't released under.