From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,9f3f1b40d2533ab8,start X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Received: by 10.68.241.98 with SMTP id wh2mr2118330pbc.7.1337090828958; Tue, 15 May 2012 07:07:08 -0700 (PDT) Path: pr3ni1673pbb.0!nntp.google.com!news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Patrick Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Chicken or the egg. New targets & runtimes Date: Tue, 15 May 2012 07:05:38 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <9934369.1060.1337090738467.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@yngr17> NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.51.111.153 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1337090828 19633 127.0.0.1 (15 May 2012 14:07:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 15 May 2012 14:07:08 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=70.51.111.153; posting-account=cUi90woAAADTaOISowbbHM8GUD0-opJO User-Agent: G2/1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: 2012-05-15T07:05:38-07:00 List-Id: I would like to use Ada for a variety of tasks but the goal that drew me to= the language in the first place was firmware hacking. I buy scientific ins= truments, used, I rebuild them and resell them(mostly to universities). I r= epair the circuit boards without schematics and it takes a long time. It is= only worth it due to the low price defective instrumentation can be purcha= sed at and the high price it can be sold at. I would like to write firmware for my instruments for three reasons: One, even if I fail, I will have spent more time learning the circuits and = this is not a bad thing. Two, if I succeed then I will be able to control a= ll manner of peripherals without ever having touched a breadboard and this = will give me the skills I need to build my own one day. Three if I succeed,= I can write my own diagnostic firmware to work in tandem with my logic ana= lyzer and the repairs will go faster. >From the feedback in the thread "understanding runtimes", I now see that Ad= a+GCC does not work the same way as C+GCC were we get a runtime for each su= pported target with no extra effort. mjs mentioned in this thread: "there are 4 billion ARM chips produced each year, and Ada is an excellent = fit for every one of those 4 billion chips" and I couldn't agree more. It will be an uphill battle the whole way as it = really seems that people just go with the flow and use languages for what t= hey are already being used for regardless of their appropriateness for othe= r purposes. However, if Ada is not supported out-of-the-box like C, then people will ne= ver try it and even if this support is there, theyu won't try it unless it'= s promoted. I am willing to help on all these fronts. So there is enough bitch'in on the internet, I want to get to work on a sol= ution instead. Luke already has a cool project: https://github.com/Lucretia/tamp and he has help me A LOT. Between his project and: http://sourceforge.net/projects/arm-ada/ and http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/avr-ada/index.php?title=3DAVR-Ada and RTOS's that support Ada on various targets like: http://www.rtems.com/ Maybe I(or we) could build a standard, just supports full, multitasking Ada= on bare metal and nothing else, mini OS / Runtime, that everyone could use= for ARM development. Once accomplish I(we) could move onto porting as many= other targets as possible too. The problem is I have a lot of catching up to do. My first issue, is that I don't even understand how Ada gets to a new targe= t. >From what I have read, gnat must be compiled on the target that it needs to= create executables for. Assuming gnat was written on X86 to begin with, ho= w did it even get onto a 64 bit system or ARM for that matter? I know very little about runtimes but would it be such a big deal if the ru= ntime was actually written in C? Could I take existing C runtimes and rewor= k them to support Ada? I really don't have a clue at this point but if some= one could point me to some helpful resources, i will try. I have more courage then brains :) -Patrick