Re: Announcing GNAT version 3.12p for Linux and Sparc Solaris

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <241019991113025768%hopperj@macconnect.com> "James E. Hopper" <hopperj@macconnect.com> writes:
>i am refering to the Machten/Codebuilder port.  the problem with ppc
>linux is that gcc will not boot strap (c or ada) unless you build it
>with either egcs or gcc 2.95 neither of which is supported for gnat.
>someone has patches to replace the gcc-281.dif patche that come with
>gnat, but i havent been able to find them.

I don't believe they exist as it is a considerable amount of work to
create them.  Moreover, those patches constitute the *easiest* of the
three tasks needed to have GNAT and GCC 2.95 interoperate.

Right now, I'm working on the task of merging in patches to the GCC2
source tree made after the last EGCS merge back into the GCC
development tree.  This is a very nontrivial task because of changes
made during EGCS development.  About 60% of the patches go in
unchanged, about half of the remaining ones represent bugs fixed
independently by EGCS, and the rest need changes, some considerable,
to apply to GCC 2.95.  I've been working on this for the last couple
of days and estimate I'm half done.  That effort would produce the
a set of patches that are similar to what you've asked for.

But there are two much more difficult tasks that also need to be done:

(1) Modify GNAT (specifically Gigi) to reflect changes in GCC
infrastructure and the front-end interface made since 2.8.1.  There
are a set of patches to do some of this (perhaps these are what you
recall seeing), but they are far from complete at this point.

(2) Debug the resulting compiler by runing ACVC and various other test
suites.  This will undoubtably uncover not just bugs in the two steps
above but also bugs in other GCC changes (including the new optimizers)
that only affect Ada code.

Having GNAT work with the latest GCC sources is something that a lot
of people want to see happen, including Ada Core Technologies, the
GCC Steering Committee, and the Ada/Linux group, so it it definitely happen,
but it will be a lot of work and take a lot of time.  The work I mention
above is definitely the first step in that task, though.