New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

[Martin]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

$25 for an ARM11 powered computer with Ubuntu on it - does that come
with Ada already?

Surely something AdaCore could get behind?

-- Martin

Re: New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:02:34 +0200, Martin <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com>  
a écrit:

> http://www.raspberrypi.org/
>
> $25 for an ARM11 powered computer with Ubuntu on it - does that come
> with Ada already?
>
> Surely something AdaCore could get behind?
>
> -- Martin

If ever that can help :
http://www.arm.com/community/partners/display_product/rw/ProductId/5620/

Note that AdaCore provides specifics programs and partnerships for  
education, so don't be afraid by the mention of GnatPro in that page.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.”  [Epigrams on  
Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [Idem]
“c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */” [Anonymous]

Re: New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

[John Kern]

On Jun 13, 6:45 am, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Le Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:02:34 +0200, Martin <martin.do...@btopenworld.com>  
> a écrit:
>
> >http://www.raspberrypi.org/
>
> > $25 for an ARM11 powered computer with Ubuntu on it - does that come
> > with Ada already?
>
> > Surely something AdaCore could get behind?
>
> > -- Martin
>
> If ever that can help :http://www.arm.com/community/partners/display_product/rw/ProductId/5620/
>
> Note that AdaCore provides specifics programs and partnerships for  
> education, so don't be afraid by the mention of GnatPro in that page.
>

It is unclear to me whether the GNU C compiler sources have an ARM
runtime package such that re-compiling the compiler suite would result
in a viable host Ada compiler.

However it seems there are ARM cross-compilers available:
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/mindstorms

and https://www2.adacore.com/gap-static/gnat_mindstorms_slides.pdf

It seems there are two flavors of ARM cross 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.

Re: New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

[Simon Clubley]

On 2011-06-14, John Kern <phone.john.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> However it seems there are ARM cross-compilers available:
> http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/mindstorms
>
> and https://www2.adacore.com/gap-static/gnat_mindstorms_slides.pdf
>
> It seems there are two flavors of ARM cross 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.

There is also the gcc used to build RTEMS applications, which contains
support for Ada and is a specific version of the FSF source tree with
patches. I have used it to build various small Ada applications on a
ARM board running RTEMS, but nothing major to date.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: New educational hardware ideal for Ada...

[Piotr Trojanek]

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.