Re: Ada, the best language with the not-so-best tool chain

[Kristoffer Nyborg Gregertsen <gregerts@gmail.com>]

kl. 19:34:51 UTC+2 søndag 7. oktober 2012 skrev Patrick følgende:
> I think Ada is the best language ever. I have a subset I like now(just 95 really ) and I find it so easy to read other peoples Ada code.
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> However.. I am I think all this goodness has come with a price. A difficult to implement language.
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> I wanted to use it for embedded design(as in baremetal) but no free of cost version lets me do that.
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> There is a new driver tutorial out for Minix3 and I was thinking about writing a driver but I can't do that either. There is no gnat on Minix and you can't cross compile for minix from Windows/Linux etc.. so I don't know how to get ada on it...
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> So basically I have Linux/BSD/Windows/OpenIndiana but these are all pretty heavy and quite complex relative to RTOS or Minix3.
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> Actually it does not really matter what /*I want */  the community as a whole doesn't have enough options when compared to C.
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> No solution will be easy but I was hoping to start a hypothetical discussion on solutions.
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> For instance:
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> 1)If we had a Ada runtime written in C, then we could cross compile with GCC as-is no?
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> 2)ASM is not really portable but surely some flavours must be, If we had a converter, we could cross compile at the ASM stage no?
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> I have only two :(
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> Does anyone have some more ideas?

If you want to run Ada on a bare-metal embedded system try GNATforAVR32. I ported GNAT to the Atmel AVR32 architecture and a Ravenscar bare-board run-time enviroment to the AVR32 UC3 microcontroller series as a part of my PhD at NTNU.

I have not had time to work on the system after finishing my PhD, but it works very well on the UC3A series, and can be updated to newer parts without much effort.

https://github.com/gregerts/GNATforAVR32