Re: free Ada compiler ?

[Pascal Obry <p.obry@wanadoo.fr>]

Let's try this.

On Windows to build Ada code you need an Ada compiler. That's the big news :)
The GNAT compiler (aka GNU/Ada) has, on Windows, 2 choices:

1) Use MingW to build executable.

   This can be seen as Native Windows compared to Cygwin. MingW based
   executable will used only standard Win32 DLL like kernel32.dll,
   advapi32.dll.

   => This is what every other Ada compiler do on Windows, except that they
   use Microsoft runtime and startup code instead of MingW.

2) Use Cygwin to build executable.

   Cygwin is a complete POSIX layer for Windows. Executables built on top of
   Cygwin does not use standard Win32 DLL directly. All calls are directed to
   cygwin.dll services. This is the only way to achieve full POSIX semantics
   on Windows.

GNAT is based on MingW and is capable of building only MingW executable. It is
also good to note that MingW based executable are faster than Cygwin based
ones.

Hope all this is clear.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"