Re: A few questions on Ada and Ada implementations

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Tero Koskinen <tero.koskinen@iki.fi> writes:

> 1)
>   GCC/GNAT from FSF (http://gcc.gnu.org/).
>   It is distributed under GMGPL (similar to LGPL) so you can link to it
>   without needing to license your own program/binary under GPL.
>   Available for almost every platform/architecture.
>
> 2)
>   GNAT GPL from AdaCore (http://libre.adacore.com/)
>   It is distributed under plain GPL, so it infects GPL into your
>   binaries. In some cases, you might need to license the source
>   also under GPL, but it is not entirely clear to me what those
>   cases are. Available for Linux/Mac/Windows at least.

AdaCore's support isn't cheap. However, they do do evaluation contracts,
you'd have to talk to them about costs.  Supported users get excellent
e-mail support and, if necessary, wavefront releases. The toolchain and
libraries can be used to create proprietary products (not
GPL-restricted).

GNAT GPL comes from the same code base and is released approximately
annually; you can report bugs to AdaCore, indeed they welcome them, but
you're not going to get assistance from them; you will get it here or at
StackOverflow. You get the same libraries as with the supported product,
but they and the runtime are released under the full GPL.

FSF GCC is maintained (mainly) by AdaCore; they usually do a backport of
their code base once per major GCC release (4.4, 4.5 ..). The compiler
can be used to create proprietary products; we don't know what
discussions took place when AdaCore decided to remove the runtime
exceptions from the Ada runtime in GNAT GPL and FSF didn't, but I'd
guess it's unlikely FSF would change. Of course, I'm not betting money
on that.