Re: will ada always be supported by gcc?

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> But I think your question really was: "can I be sure that Ada will
> continue to be part of the GCC compiler suite *on MacOS X* for a long
> time?"  I cannot answer that definitively; for starters, Apple's GCC
> does not support Ada at all; the existing GNAT for MacOS X is pretty
> much a community project, AFAICT, and so is no better and no worse
> than GPC on Mac OS X.
       ???

Darwin is a standard build option in GCC; you can buy support for a
Darwin GNAT from AdaCore or you can download the GPL version.

The GCC maintainers don't regard Darwin as a primary target (unlike
Linux). But it hasn't been a stopper so far.

At the moment I think the difficulties arise with Apple oddities and
even bugs: for example,

PR42554[1] is down to Apple's introduction and then deprecation of
"ranlib -c".

PR50678[2] is caused by Apple's stack unwinding having a mistaken view
of how registers are stored after a stack overflow, which only seems to
affect GNAT.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42554
[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50678