Re: Ada compiler using a M2 compiler as back-end

[Rugxulo <rugxulo@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Feb 9, 7:12 am, Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-
Earth.UFP> wrote:
>
> One of the annoyances about the alternate Wirth type languages is
> that they have some nice features which make writing safe code easier,
> but they, unlike Ada, don't appear to be targetted for hard real time
> bare metal environments.

Modula-2 was used to write MeDos and all the apps for the Lilith
machine. Oberon was used for the Oberon (Ceres) system and ports.
Modula-3 was (unofficially) used for SPIN OS, esp. since it was
designed to optionally permit "UNSAFE" code and "UNTRACED" references
(temporarily disable garbage collection).

> Ada runs just fine on the Atmel AVR and, when used under RTEMS, can be
> made to run on a ARM board if you are willing to write a BSP.
>
> GNU Modula-2 looks like (maybe) a possible candidate if you only want a
> basic set of language capabilities, but I find it's upper case keywords
> to be really ugly.

I hear that a lot, but you shouldn't judge a language by its syntax. A
good text editor (e.g. Emacs) or simple script can alleviate simple
things like that.

GM2 handles quite a lot, IMO, but I guess your mileage may vary. No
language can do it all. Though I vaguely remember hearing about AVR
stuff ... (quick search) ... check here:

http://floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk/Glamorgan/gaius/web/gm2-avr.html

> Oberon has some talk about running on a NXP MCU, but I could not find
> any mention of it's real time characteristics (it uses garbage collection),
> it's footprint or porting effort involved or which of it's several
> variants would be best for exploring further. I did find mention of a
> port to the AVR, but that appears to have been a one-off effort.

You should check out CFBSoftware's website. Also he's one of the only
ones still posting in comp.lang.oberon. He does embedded stuff
primarily with the Oberon-07 dialect. For him it's apparently good
enough. For desktop stuff, I think he uses the Component Pascal [sic]
[Oberon] dialect with .NET runtime.

http://www.cfbsoftware.com/default.aspx
http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

> Has anyone used any of the other Wirth type languages in a bare metal
> environment and how did they compare to Ada ?

Honestly, they're all nice languages (though I'm very inexperienced),
but I don't see how you plan to gain anything over Ada. This may sound
silly, but they're all probably good enough for most things. They've
all been around the block, so to speak.