From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.5 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,TO_NO_BRKTS_PCNT autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.glorb.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 08:24:37 -0500 Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 09:24:36 -0400 From: Peter Chapin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-suptHW4aJVBfVTNihgs48rIvxQX9Xv23VU9xEKAe1pWgR/9u7sxLPtMRdkMTGZsvs9E8TTxhrPrOJ5g!lbyo8+glduJZnXeJbfYVc/y0uCNFM66DrYI25r+y9SvOc2tj3pUvOoozCPWUPV4= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3841 Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:18845 Date: 2014-03-19T09:24:36-04:00 List-Id: In another thread Shark8 posted a proposal to build an IDE+compiler for Ada 2012. In his post he notes that having a second open source compiler offering (besides GNAT) for Ada would be good for the Ada community. I agree. GNAT is a fine product but it would enrich the eco-system if there were alternatives. Accordingly I started a pet project for myself to build an Ada 2012 compiler from the ground up which I'm calling "Augusta." The project is here: https://github.com/pchapin/augusta I am not as naive as I probably sound. I fully understand that such a project is massive and not likely to actually ever be completed. Fortunately that's not important to me. The project is just a hobby project and its *real* purpose is to provide me with a source of entertainment in my off hours. It can fulfill that role perfectly well even if it never amounts to anything. This situation also frees me to make design choices that interest me without feeling the need to justify them rationally. For example Augusta will be written in Scala and will target LLVM. I choose these technologies because I like them and I'd like to learn more about them, not because I think they are somehow the "best" or most logical choices. I have been planning to announce Augusta's existence to the community at some point but right now the project is 99% talk and 1% action (at most) and I had thought to wait until the balance was a little different. However, Shark8's announcement of his IDE proposal made this seem like a reasonable time. I support his desire to develop such tools and who knows... perhaps Augusta can play some role in his project someday. Right now Augusta is little more than a place holder with some documents outlining my vision for the project. I have set a release date for myself of December 31, 2020 in an effort to apply some structure to my work. My hope is to have something "interesting" done by that time... although I'm not going to claim it will be full Ada 2012. In the meantime I've been using Augusta as a source of class examples and student exercises in a compiler course I'm teaching at Vermont Technical College. The work there has been in a sub-project called Allegra which is intended to be a compiler for a series of highly reduced Ada subsets with increasing complexity. In addition to supporting my course, my thought was to use Allegra as a kind of experimentation space for the technologies that will ultimately be part of Augusta. However, I'm not clear how much, if any, of the methods used in Allegra would actually transfer to the more complex Augusta project itself. Anyway, enough said... I invite anyone who is interested to browse around in the project. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Peter