Re: Gnat cross-compiler for m68k, PowerPc

["David Brown" <david@no.westcontrol.spam.com>]

"Samuel Tardieu" <sam@rfc1149.net> wrote in message
news:87vg5rdib6.fsf@inf.enst.fr...
> >>>>> "David" == David Brown <david@no.westcontrol.spam.com> writes:
>
> David> I'm not expecting to use any OS on the systems -although it
> David> might be interesting to try RTEMS, I'd also like to be able to
> David> build Ada programs that are not dependant on any OS.
>
> Back in 1996-1998, our team used RTEMS + GNAT on a Motorola 68360
> (quite similar to the 68332 you are thinking of) robot and it was a
> great success. Both GNAT and RTEMS performed very well.
>

I'm definitely going to give this a go - it looks like RTEMS is going to be
the easiest way to get things going with Ada on my systems.  It may turn out
that I don't use RTEMS in the end, but I'll get the tools from there (and it
may turn out that I *do* use RTEMS, even for my C programming).

> David> Out of curiosity, is Ada practical for smaller chips?  We also
> David> use the msp430 (16-bit) and the avr (8-bit), both of which have
> David> gcc ports.  Is it realistic to use Ada for these chips?  A
> David> serious RTOS like RTEMS is certainly out of the question here.
>
> Even if other persons will say it fits well, I would personally
> recommend against using Ada on the smallest devices, as you may easily
> get frustrated by the tiny amount of code you will be able to put on
> board (the same holds for C). If you have to use a smaller processor,
> you may feel more comfortable with a language such as Forth which is
> closer to the metal and lets you use all the (low) power available (at
> the expense of not having all the nice Ada features such as type
> checking).
>

Forth has always struct me as a nice idea, but it is in desperate need of an
overhall.  But I'm used to small micros - I've programmed many systems where
the only practical language is assembly, given the space and the CPU
architecture.  However, devices like the avr and msp430 are well suiting to
higher-level languages (at least C), and there are parts with 64 k or 128 k
flash, which is plenty of code space.  But I'll try things out on the bigger
68k device first, and see whether Ada is something I can use to improve my
work (my guess is it will, if I put in enough time learning it).