Re: Visual Studio IDE - Integration

[alby.gamper@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at 7:37:18 PM UTC+11, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On 07/02/2017 08:46, Hadrien Grasland wrote:
> 
> > To clarify, GDB is actually pretty awesome as a command-line tool.
> > But  no one has ever bothered - or managed - to write a good GUI frontend 
> for it.
> 
> In fact GPS has a pretty cool debugger's front end. It has a bit less 
> comfortable debugging interface than Visual Studio's, but still all 
> bells and whistles.
> 
> IMO GPS is far better than latter incarnations of Visual Studio. Since 
> VS 2005 it goes clearly down the slope. The only thing where Studio is 
> better than GPS is debugging. [*]
> 
> The problem is that it becomes usable when the project gets any larger 
> and more complex.
> 
> Knowing that AdaCore has awesome software designers and that other parts 
> of the tool-chain are working seamless, I put blame squarely on GDB.
> 
> -----------------
> * And MS linker. GNU linker is a disaster with regard to performance. It 
> takes literally an hour to link a large stand-alone relocatable library.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Dmitry A. Kazakov
> http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Dear Dmitry

I've looked at using gcc to compile a simple hello world app in "C" and then
link using the MS linker. This does work (after a bit of tweaking. However
Ada/gnat is a bit harder due to the additional RTS/mingw dependencies and
VC 2015 runtime has dropped of support for some legacy routines (for example
__iob_func ...)

I believe the best approach may be to built the RTS using gcc and then link
using MS linker. Once that is done, then linking normal apps against this new
RTS should be straight forward.

Problem is I have little documentation available on how to rebuild the actual
RTS (I can compile the Ada sources, but their is a bunch of "C" files that also
need to be compiled, and subsequently linked to produce the RTS (ie libgnat.a)

Thanks

Alex