Re: Ada and embedded applications

[Matthew Woodcraft <mattheww@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

"Chris Campbell" <chris.danx@ntlworld.com> writes:

> Out of interest GNAT is based upon GCC i think and GCC compiles things
> to an intermediate form -- a RTL -- (is this right?)

Not quite - RTL is processor-specific. There is a processor-independent
intermediate form, but it comes earlier in the compilation process than
RTL.

> so all you'd really need to do is port specific parts of GNAT to the
> OS if any on the new processor and have a GCC backend that compiles to
> that processor. It seems like it really wouldn't take that long after
> you've got this. Is my understanding of this all barmy?

That's more-or-less right. Creating a GCC back end for a new processor
is a decent-sized job, but in most cases one will already exist, and the
'only' effort would be making it work with GNAT. That's very little
effort compared with writing an Ada compiler from scratch, for sure, but
nonetheless I guess it's tricky to do correctly.

-M-