Re: Ada, the best language with the not-so-best tool chain

[Brian Drummond <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk>]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:09:26 -0700, Patrick wrote:

>> I hate to break this to you, but no *professional developer* cares what
>> a "hobbyist" needs for software development. AdaCore has made a lot of
>> useful things available, but all of those were developed for big,
>> paying, professional developers.
> 
> I think this is exactly what is wrong with Ada and what needs to be
> fixed or it will die. I don't think we should look to private companies
> to solve our community problems, they have to think of their own
> survival. My suggestions might have been silly but can anyone, please,
> make a technical suggestion as to what we could do as a community to
> make Ada more portable and/or suitable for bare metal use ?

Yes. Randy is absolutely right that professional developers and their 
tool chain suppliers can't afford to cater to amateurs. $49 * a lot may 
work as a business model, but $49 * the current Ada hobbyist market - or 
even $499 * a smaller segment of it ... no way.

But we are fortunate in FSF Gnat and in Adacore's Libre products. SO what 
can we do? Run with them, and devote a little of our own time to making 
them better. Build avr-gcc with Ada support and report any problems or 
improvements in the build process to the project. Or ... Document a neat 
example program. Fix a bug. Or even report one (with testcase) to Adacore 
or on the relevant mailing list.

At an individual level it doesn't matter what, as long as we put 
something back.

When I reported a way of crashing the GtkAda test program, it was fixed 
the next day. (Reporting a minor bug to Adacore, it took a bit longer!)

I have done a little for AVR-Ada - hopefully improve the experience of 
building it - and still have to write up a stepper motor driver for the 
AVR-Ada wiki.

As I am between jobs, I managed to spend three weeks on a sizeable open-
source Ada project (ghdl, a VHDL front end for gcc) bringing it back into 
a usable state. (It was mostly C work, as gcc has changed a fair bit 
since 4.3...)

I want to build Gnat for the Arm, and return to the problem of targeting 
Android with it. Don't know if I'll find the time, but...

Specifically for bare metal? Learn to build Arm-Ada, or the "bare bones 
OS" introductions, 
http://wiki.osdev.org/Ada_Bare_bones
Read the AVR-Ada RTS, maybe try to port something like it to the 
equivalent Arm board (LPC Expresso, or the $5 Stellaris Launchpad.

We (mostly) don't have the time to do much, but each of us can make a 
small difference.

- Brian