Re: Ada OS based on Minix3

[Ivan Levashew <octagram@bluebottle.com>]

Cedric Lannock wrote:

> As it has to few lines of code it should be
> possible to build a kernel in overseeable time.

Kernel isn't enough. Drivers, applications. And, the most essential
thing, users' and developers' awareness, what's wrong with other OSes;
what's wrong with GNU, Microsoft and Apple.

I'm wondering what you're trying to achieve with Ada OS? Is it just a
casting tech skills?

Two general problems of starting an enterprise Ada project are as
follows:
Lack of libraries
Lack of developers

While you can do little about the second, you can at least do binding
generators. There are 2 unfinished ones: GNATCOM and GNAT-SWIG.

GNATCOM is part of GNAVI project. GNAVI was quite popular several
years ago.
GNATCOM fails to compile on latest GNAT (Ada 2005). I have succeded in
making it running and created a demo Delphi+Ada webserver using it.
One need to delete "-gnatg" option out of GNATCOM Makefiles and rename
GNATCOM.Interface package to another name, e. g. COM_Interface. It
will at least be working, but still not convenient to use (due to
thinness of data types, e. g. one has to write Issue.Attach
(DB_Access.Get_Issue); Rubrics.Attach (Issue.Get_Rubrics); instead of
DB_Access.Issue.Rubrics). GNATCOM doesn't claim to be thick binding
generator after all.

Another unfinished stuff is GNAT-SWIG. It was started in 2006, when
Ada 2005 implementation wasn't stable and complete. An essential thing
like GNAT-SWIG should feel like Ada 2005, so it might need to be
changed as well.


Or, if you want to start from scratch, you have an option to make
binding generator for XPCOM and UNO (OpenOffice.org). First will give
a good crossplatform UI. Starting from v1.9, Gecko finally got Mac OS
X right, and it's currently AFAIK the only UI engine that feels native
on every OS.

UNO bindings will enable Ada applications to portably manage Office
documents.

The work to be done is as hardcore as writing OS, yet indeed much more
people would benefit from it.

I don't think that something 100% Ada is a good idea because nowadays
lorry number of such projects is very small.

>
> Another thought to get this project taking some speed would be not to
> rewrite all the available C code but to develop a translator c2ada. It
> would us getting startet and the resulting code could be enhanced and
> improved.
>
I have a better idea: first, manually convert C code to Cyclone code
(that's what Cyclone is really good for). Then it could be more easily
translated into Ada code.