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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: GNAT for an unsupported Unix-system?
Date: 1997/11/17
Message-ID: <dewar.879823196@merv>#1/1
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References: <618.253T1150T10101574@cs.tu-berlin.de>
 <87zpn5666i.fsf@mihalis.i-have-a-misconfigured-system-so-shoot-me>
 <1630.259T1446T2081822@cs.tu-berlin.de>
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Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-11-17T00:00:00+00:00
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<<Thank you for the information. I really don't know why I didn't think
about this, and as I luckily have access to SparcStations at the
University, I'll probably get it done somehow. I can't see however,
why this solution is better than writing a small subset-compiler in
C, and I would suppose, that some, though not many, don't have access
to a system supported by the binary distributions. And, installing
and compiling gcc for crosscompiling is also not _that_ straight-
forward. At least it's much easier to do ./configure and then make.

Tor-Einar
>>


This solution is certainly *simpler* than writing a "small subset compiler
in C", since it requires zero work. Writing that small subset compiler in
C is a FAR bigger task than you think, a few person years of work I would
guess, GNAT does not use all of Ada 95, but it uses a very large subset.

The real point is that in practice, even if you don't know enough to build
a cross-compiler, someone somewhere has the knowledge and hardware to do so,
and in practice versions of GNAT have appeared pretty easily.

Also, to think that ./configure would ever be enough is ignoring the
runtime library issue. Porting the entire runtime library is not a trivial
task, and if you don't know enough to build a cross-compiler, you probably
won't succeed with the runtime (let alone the full tool chain including gdb).