Re: Ada for embedded

[Francesco Bochicchio <bockman@virgilio.it>]

Il Sat, 10 Feb 2007 22:16:49 -0800, korayem.m ha scritto:

> hi all
> i want to learn how to use ada in embedded system programming
> 
> can anyone guide me, give me resources -books tutotials- or anything
> can help me
> 
> 
> Thank you all in advance

I have been part of a team developing an ADA application for an embedded
platform consisting of a bare PowerPC-based board without any OS (only a
custom Board Support Library written in C library supporting the board
initialization and I/O operations ).

In these conditions I found quite a few differences wrt developing in ADA
for a standard platform (which I also have done):

- The Ada RunTime is reduced: ours (GMART) was lacking the following (some
  where not include because of safety reasons):
  * tasks
  * exceptions
  * I/O standard library
  * string manipulation libraries
  * dynamic allocation

- The debugging is quite different:
  * You may found that your application has to deal with problems
    that are usually dealt by the OS (depending an how good/complex the
    Board Support Library is)
  * you need special hardware/software to debug remotely the software:
  these tools are helpful but often alter significantly the run conditions
  so that you get debugging-induced errors or are not able to reproduce
  errors that occurs without debugging
  * No text console output : you have to organize your own trace system
  using some I/O channel (in our case we used a serial port not used for
  nominal operations ).

Most of these problems are not ADA-related but have to do with the lack of
a full OS supporting your application, coupled with the fact that
embedded software has often also strict real-time requirements.

P.S : Nobody in the team had significant experience with this kind of
development, hence the experience has been instructive but __VERY__ hard.
  

Ciao
-----
FB