Re: New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

[Piotr Trojanek <piotr.trojanek@gmail.com>]

On 14 Cze, 16:42, John Kern <phone.john.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems there are two flavors ofARMcross compilers available as
> GNAT GPL, one on a free OSEK OS, and another bare Ravenscar profile.
> Presumably someone would need to modify the Lego NXT board support
> package to accommodate new hardware, but at least there must be some
> example code provided with the GPL compiler.

As far as I know, there are 4 possibilities to use Ada on ARM.

1. There is a SF project which guides you to "port" the bare-board
Ada Ravenscar GNAT 2010 compiler from Lego NXT to other ARM boards:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/arm-ada/

Basically, what you have to do is to provide constants matching
IO ports and ISR identifiers for your board.

2. Mindstorms GNAT 2009, which is based on OSEK. It supports only
statically
created tasks and no Ada tasking features. However, you can still
write your
code in Ada rather than C/C++.

3. RTEMS is the way to go, when you need complete (i.e., more than
Ravenscar)
Ada runtime on a resource limited ARM board.

4. If it is possible to run Linux on your ARM board and (cross)compile
C/C++ code
with GCC, it should be reasonably straightforward to build a also GNAT
(cross)compiler.

Piotr.