Re: understanding runtime support

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<mjsilva@scriptoriumdesigns.com> wrote in message 
news:10099625.0.1337029342748.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@yneh4...
...
>I find this situation rather insane as well.  As you said, Ada is an 
>embedded language.
> OK, to be more precise, Ada is a language which had as a primary design 
> goal the
> creation of embedded applications.  And yet it seems in practice to be 
> quite impossible
> to use on embedded applications without a full-blown OS/RTOS underneath 
> it.

That's certainly not true. But a true bare machine version of any 
programming language is expensive and has to built more-or-less from scratch 
for that machine. Much of the work is not usable on a different bare 
machine.

Thus this usually takes a *lot* of effort, and thus it usually takes $$$$.

At least with GNAT, you can get the needed source and subsistute hours of 
sweat for the $$$$. But this is not likely to be an easy task.

> Sadly, there does not seem to be a cookbook as to how to create such a 
> bare metal port for other devices/families.

Nothing "sad" about it; it's unavoidable. There is no "cookbook" to creating 
bare machine versions; they have to be tailored to the device and board 
capabilities. There would be no programming languages supporting a board if 
the board manufacturer didn't spend $$$ tailoring some language to support 
it. Not surprisingly, they tend to pick something simple (like C) to 
support, and usually make it even harder to support Ada on those targets 
(because people want compatibility with the C compiler for the board).

>  I find the situation be be rather astonishing.  As I pointed out in 
> another thread, there are
> 4 billion ARM chips produced each year, and Ada is an excellent fit for 
> every one of those
> 4 billion chips, but the Ada community doesn't seem to be interested in 
> that market, or any
> of the numerous other 32-bit embedded parts available.  This strikes me as 
> madness if one
> wants Ada to grow and prosper.

One needs customers in order to make the large investments needed in this 
sort of technology. RRS, at least, has never had anyone express any real 
interest in ARM targets, so we've never even thought about such machines. 
After all, there are a lot other chips out there that also could be 
programmed in Ada (Z80, 8051, etc.) and there never was any interest in 
doing those, either.

Things rarely happen for free, you know.

                                                    Randy.