Re: The GNU Ada compiler

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

"Steve Whalen" <SteveWhalen001@hotmail.com> writes:
> In particular for proselytizing Ada, stable GMGPL Ada compilers need
> to be available for Windows (Ming and cygwin), Redhat, SUSE,
> Mandrake, and Solaris.

I agree wholeheartedly.  For Windows, there are already two binary
distributions of GNAT under GMGPL: AIDE[1], and MinGW[2].  I have
tried neither of them (since I don't have Windows) but it seems to me
that MinGW has the larger mind share, and AIDE the better quality
thanks to the dedication of its maintainer, Stéphane Rivière.

Solaris also has a binary distribution[3,4] containing both GCC 3.4.4
and 4.0.1 with Ada support; but I have never tried it and I cannot
assess its quality.

FreeBSD[5] seems not to be very active WRT Ada, but there are ports
for gnat 3.15p, asis and glade.  The ports for GCC 3.4.4, 4.0.3, 4.1.0
and 4.2.0 (the latter three being works in progress) lack Ada support.
I am quite confident that FreeBSD's GCC maintainer would gratefully
accept patches to enable Ada on that platform.

[1] http://stephane.rochebrune.org/aide/aide.html
[2] http://www.mingw.org
[3] http://www.blastwave.org
[4] http://www.canoedissent.org.uk/ss/type.jsp?c=prog
[5] http://www.freebsd.org

Now, it would be nice if Red Hat, SuSE and Mandriva would improve
their support for Ada.  The best way to make this happen is to lobby
them, join their GCC maintenance teams, and contribute.  Martin's
project on SourceForge is a good testing ground for patches.  Well
tested patches and build scripts stand a good chance of being accepted
into these distributions.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.