Re: OS in Ada, what about the compiler?

["Steve" <nospam_steved94@comcast.net>]

"Lucretia" <lucretia9@lycos.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:1191880545.979964.152370@g4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
>
> I've been thinking about working on an OS but writing it in Ada,
> wanted to do it for a while and have in the past written a few hello
> world style kernels for different platforms; these basically used the
> "pragma No_Run_Time;" in the source.
>
> But, say I wanted a stripped down runtime, no tasking, just be able
> use things like attributes, tagged types, overloading, etc. What
> exactly would I have to do to GNAT to get this far?
>

I don't know enough about the compiler to answer directly, but the folks 
that put together AVA-Ada, which is GNAT targeting the 8 bit AVR 
microcontrollers have produced a stripped down runtime for that target.  I 
don't know exactly what features are supported, but it might be useful to 
see how they adapted GNAT for that target.

http://avr-ada.sourceforge.net/

There is some documetation here:

http://www.iuma.ulpgc.es/users/jmiranda/gnat-rts/index.htm

on the GNU Ada runtime.  You might be able to figure out how the compiler 
uses the run-time and implement your own non-posix runtime in its place.

I hope this helps,

Steve
(The Duck)

> Any platform, but ultimately IA32 for starters - I'd prefer to start
> on a simpler architecture, like ARM or MIPS, for example. But anyway.
>
> Thanks,
> Luke.
>