Re: Newcomers to

[Brian Drummond <brian3@shapes.demon.co.uk>]

On Thu, 09 Oct 2014 14:31:54 +0100, Simon Wright wrote:

> Mark Carroll <mtbc@bcs.org> writes:
> 
>> Ada does look good but, as far as I can tell, if I ever want to use it
>> for any software not to be distributed under the GPL,...

> If you are prepared to use the FSF GCC unsupported (except by the
> goodwill of folk here, on Stack Overflow, and on IRC somewhere), and you
> can get hold of a build with Ada enabled (Debian Linux (easy),
> probably other Linux distributions, Mac OS X, ...) then you can develop
> code and release binaries under any licence that you want:
> see GCC Runtime Library Exception[1], Rationale document and Frequently
> Asked Questions[2].

On the subject of mingw, I don't know how many people know of this 
option, but I was a little surprised to see mingw packages, including FSF 
Gnat, available on Debian.

Turns out it's a cross-compiler. So having developed an Ada app on Debian, 
I can invoke the mingw crosscompiler and build a Windows executable. So 
far these have worked flawlessly, including interfacing between Ada and a 
C library talking to a USB device.

The executable is larger - typically 800k instead of 150k for native 
Linux executables. Haven's investigated why but I assume it's statically 
linked to eliminate dependencies, and I haven't had to install anything 
other than the exe on Windows machines so far.

One more option and probably the simplest way to use FSF GCC targetting  
Windows machines...


- Brian