help bridging C and Ada

[Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org>]

Please forgive any ignorance in this post. I am not a professional
programmer. In fact this is why I am attracted to Ada. I believe the
strict compiler will substitute for years of experience with buggy
languages. This seem to be an overlooked feature of the language.

While I am planning on using it for embedded use later, at the moment
it is all desktop and as you know, it's a world dominated by C and
it's cousins.

I am having some luck with gnat's -fdump-ada-spec feature and I can
use it to integrate simple C functions I have written.

However when I try to bind large libraries like gstreamer I end up
with a sort of dependency hell. -fdump-ada-spec-slim just generates
the one spec file but when I try to build with the generated spect, I
get errors about other spec files missing. Without the slim option I
get about 100 specs. I tried to "with" them all but I ended up with
more errors about circular dependencies.

I've also tried pragma import. I can get an executable compiled but
when I call it I get errors like: stack overflow (or erroneous memory
access)

that was with with Gstreamer and I had others errors when I tried the
same process with gtk.

All I really need is a way to create a small bridge between a C
application and an Ada one. Is there a way to do this without creating
such a deep interface with fdump? Should I try the pragma route some
more or is this feature problematic?

I am not attracted to pipes but is this a more sensible option?

If anyone would like me to post code please let me know.

Thanks for reading-Patrick