Re: Visual Studio IDE - Integration

[alby.gamper@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 2:41:15 PM UTC+11, alby....@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at 7:37:18 PM UTC+11, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> > On 07/02/2017 08:46, Hadrien Grasland wrote:
> > 
> > > To clarify, GDB is actually pretty awesome as a command-line tool.
> > > But  no one has ever bothered - or managed - to write a good GUI frontend 
> > for it.
> > 
> > In fact GPS has a pretty cool debugger's front end. It has a bit less 
> > comfortable debugging interface than Visual Studio's, but still all 
> > bells and whistles.
> > 
> > IMO GPS is far better than latter incarnations of Visual Studio. Since 
> > VS 2005 it goes clearly down the slope. The only thing where Studio is 
> > better than GPS is debugging. [*]
> > 
> > The problem is that it becomes usable when the project gets any larger 
> > and more complex.
> > 
> > Knowing that AdaCore has awesome software designers and that other parts 
> > of the tool-chain are working seamless, I put blame squarely on GDB.
> > 
> > -----------------
> > * And MS linker. GNU linker is a disaster with regard to performance. It 
> > takes literally an hour to link a large stand-alone relocatable library.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Regards,
> > Dmitry A. Kazakov
> > http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de
> 
> Dear Dmitry
> 
> I've looked at using gcc to compile a simple hello world app in "C" and then
> link using the MS linker. This does work (after a bit of tweaking. However
> Ada/gnat is a bit harder due to the additional RTS/mingw dependencies and
> VC 2015 runtime has dropped of support for some legacy routines (for example
> __iob_func ...)
> 
> I believe the best approach may be to built the RTS using gcc and then link
> using MS linker. Once that is done, then linking normal apps against this new
> RTS should be straight forward.
> 
> Problem is I have little documentation available on how to rebuild the actual
> RTS (I can compile the Ada sources, but their is a bunch of "C" files that also
> need to be compiled, and subsequently linked to produce the RTS (ie libgnat.a)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Alex

Dear Dmitry

I have managed to build a new RTS (libgnat) using the MS linker and a small test
Ada application that links against this RTS using the MS Linker. The bad news is
that all debug info is lost in the process. I believe the info is still in the
final exe, but the relevant DWARF ".debug_xxx" sections get renamed to 8 chars
by the MS linker and no longer usable/convertable !

Alex