Re: Petition ARM to not hinder Ada

[Paul Colin Gloster <Gloucester@nicht.at>]

On October 14th, 2015, Simon Wright has sent:
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Paul Colin de Gloucester <Gloster@nicht.at> writes:                    |
|                                                                        |
|> It is possible to obtain GNAT for ARM if one is already an Ada        |
|> programmer and wants to obtain an Ada compiler. However, a person who |
|> is simply planning on targeting ARM hardware might accept a           |
|> cross-compiler for bad languages. ARM provides a copy of GCC with a   |
|> customized configuration script which is incompatible with the        |
|> standard switch --enable-languages=ada for configure but ARM indicated|
|> to me that if demand could be shown, then ARM might support Ada.      |
|                                                                        |
|So far as I can see there are three places where said script says       |
|"--enable-languages=c,c++" (and one "--enable-languages=c", probably for|
|bootstrap) which wouldn't be too hard to change?"                       |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Hi,

They had not been hard to add "ada," to. As I had reported, ARM
provided a "script which is incompatible" with this option. For
example:
"[. . .]
checking for gnatmake... gnatmake
checking whether compiler driver understands Ada... yes
[. . .]
make[3]: Leaving directory
'/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/gcc-final/arm-none-eabi/libgcc'
make[2]: Leaving directory
'/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/gcc-final/arm-none-eabi/libgcc'
Checking multilib configuration for libada...
[. . .]
checking for
arm-none-eabi-gcc... /home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/gcc-final/./gcc/xgcc
-B/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/gcc-final/./gcc/
-B/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/install-native/arm-none-eabi/bin/
-B/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/install-native/arm-none-eabi/lib/
-isystem
/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/install-native/arm-none-eabi/include
-isystem
/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/install-native/arm-none-eabi/sys-include
checking for C compiler default output file name...
configure: error: in
`/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/gcc-final/arm-none-eabi/libada':
configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
Makefile:11773: recipe for target 'configure-target-libada' failed
make[1]: *** [configure-target-libada] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory
'/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/gcc-final'
Makefile:839: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2"

|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"More serious is that build-prerequisites failed in mpfr-2.4.2 with     |
|"error: invalid instruction mnemonic 'ffreep'", ugh."                   |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Maybe for thee but not for me. From the same build log:
"[. . .]
make[1]: Leaving directory
'/home/gloucester/Not_building_native_GNAT_when_trying_this_toolchain/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609/build-native/mpfr'
+ make install
[. . .]
checking for the correct version of mpfr.h... yes
[. . .]"

|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"This might I suppose have to do with the Howto still referring to OS X |
|10.7, while the world has moved on to 10.11 ..."                        |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I believe that ARM would be receptive to feedback from thee.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"> ARM emailed on September 22nd, 2015:                                 |
|> "> From: Colin Paul de Glocester [. . .]                              |
|>> Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 6:48 PM                             |
|>>                                                                      |
|>> Ada is a very good engineering language. You should consider it.     |
|>                                                                       |
|> Note that including it or not result of a compromise: including it    |
|> will make our toolchain bigger which incurs a penalty for all the     |
|> people not using this language but downloading our toolchain. So it   |
|> needs to be balanced with the number of people who would benefit from |
|> having this support. I invite you to create a question on the         |
|> Launchpad page to keep public track of this request."                 |
|>                                                                       |
|> Would you like to ask such a question on                              |
|>  HTTPS://Answers.Launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded ?                     |
|                                                                        |
|And did you?"                                                           |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|

No. If I would had, would others had responded?

Thy sincerely,
Nicholas Collin Paul de Gloucester