Ada on embedded devices (Was: Ada on Nintendo DS ?)

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

Brian Drummond wrote:

> Difficult. But IMO the more people building Ada for embedded
> platforms, the easier it will become, if we share information and feed
> back fixes into the process.

Agreed.

You might want to follow the AVR-Ada mailing list/newsgroup
(nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.comp.hardware.avr.ada), even if your primary
embedded platform is a different one.

I have a selection of different embedded devices here on my desk.  All
of which I intend to program in Ada at some point.

 + MSP430 (TI Launchpad) - GCC but no Ada reported yet (according to
   Google).

One known Ada project targeting the MSP430 used AdaMagic as a front-end
to a C compiler targeting MSP430.  Not my favourite solution, but
definitely a possible solution.

 + Atmel (Arduino etc.) - AVR-Ada works but without much of a run-time
   system.

We are actively using AVR-Ada on a commercial project I'm working on.

 + ARM (various boards) - GNAT works (apparently) flawlessly on
   Debian/Squeeze on Raspberry Pi.  Tero Koskinen is doing some work to
   get Gumstix modules to the same level of Ada support as the Raspberry
   Pi.  ACT has a cool demo of GNAT with a Ravenscar run-time running on
   Mindstorms NXT (I have some LEGO here in the office too ;-).

I'll publish build instructions and test results here as I get things to
work.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
                                         -- Bertrand Russell