Re: [Announce] AVR-Ada V0.1 released

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

"Jim Granville" <no.spam@designtools.co.nz> wrote in message
news:HobAb.11589$ws.1077937@news02.tsnz.net...
> "Rolf Ebert" <rolf.ebert_nospam_@gmx.net> wrote in message
> news:46b8b50a.0312050448.654d6da4@posting.google.com...
> > We are proud to announce the first release of AVR-Ada, one of the first
> > GCC based Ada compilers targeting 8-bit microcontrolers.
>
> Interesting.  I presume this outputs C, which is then compiled ?

No, gcc is built in two halves - the front-ends and back-ends are fairly
well seperated.  When the back-end has been ported to a processor (such as
the avr), you get all the front-ends for free.  That means that once the gcc
C compiler was working on the AVR, much of the gnu ada, fortran, C++,
objective C, and possibly even java compilers were also done.  There is a
certain amount of interaction between the front-end and the back-end that
needs to be catered for, but I expect that the main bulk of the work in
getting AVR-Ada in action was the support libraries.

> How does this then handle symbolic debug in the AVR source, in (eg) AVR
> Studio ?

gdb works with the jtag ice, and will support Ada fine.  You could use that
with gvd as a front-end, which will probably work very well since the gvd
authors are ADA addicts themselves (gvd is written in ADA).


>
> Is anyone working on Ada for 51MX core (FAR calls etc extensions, just
> starting to appear in FLASH),
> and/or perhaps for the 128KF/256KF 80C51variants from Winbond, Cygnal, STm
> ?
>  Of these, the ST and Cygnal devices have good In Circuit DEBUG support.
>
> There was talk a while ago of Ada for the XA51, but that has only 2 flash
> models,
> with smallish code size and not a wide market base.
>
> -jg
>
>