Re: Petition ARM to not hinder Ada

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Paul Colin de Gloucester <Gloster@nicht.at> writes:

> It is possible to obtain GNAT for ARM if one is already an Ada
> programmer and wants to obtain an Ada compiler. However, a person who
> is simply planning on targeting ARM hardware might accept a
> cross-compiler for bad languages. ARM provides a copy of GCC with a
> customized configuration script which is incompatible with the
> standard switch --enable-languages=ada for configure but ARM indicated
> to me that if demand could be shown, then ARM might support Ada.

So far as I can see there are three places where said script says
"--enable-languages=c,c++" (and one "--enable-languages=c", probably for
bootstrap) which wouldn't be too hard to change?

More serious is that build-prerequisites failed in mpfr-2.4.2 with
"error: invalid instruction mnemonic 'ffreep'", ugh.

This might I suppose have to do with the Howto still referring to OS X
10.7, while the world has moved on to 10.11 ...

> ARM emailed on September 22nd, 2015:
> "> From: Colin Paul de Glocester [. . .]
>> Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 6:48 PM
>>
>> Ada is a very good engineering language. You should consider it.
>
> Note that including it or not result of a compromise: including it
> will make our toolchain bigger which incurs a penalty for all the
> people not using this language but downloading our toolchain. So it
> needs to be balanced with the number of people who would benefit from
> having this support. I invite you to create a question on the
> Launchpad page to keep public track of this request."
>
> Would you like to ask such a question on
>  HTTPS://Answers.Launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded ?

And did you?