Ada support in RTEMS, was: Re: Newbie to RTEMS: ADA support issue

[Joel Sherrill]

Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 19/06/2009, Ralf Corsepius <ralf.corsepius at rtems.org> wrote:
>   
>>  I guess you won't like what I will say now:
>>
>>  My advice: Forget about Ada and forget about RTEMS/Ada.
>>
>>     
>
> I know that over the years you have expressed annoyance at the issues
> involved in building gcc with Ada support. However, the above is a
> more stronger comment than I remember you making previously. :-)
>   
Ralf is not an Ada fan. :-) 
> Are there any actual plans to drop Ada support in RTEMS ?
>   
No.  It is actually in better shape than it has been
in years.  The Ada in GCC itself will build multilib
versions of the run-time now.  This was always a
requirement for adding them to the RPMs.

The RTEMS specific parts of the Ada run-time
support Ada interrupt tasks, the stack checking,
and generally support every features that any other
embedded port does.


For RTEMS itself, there was work done in the last
couple of years to ensure that the Ada test suite
ran ok and the bindings got a little work.

The tool tests I run include Ada and it is possible to
get great ACATS results on SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS,
ARM and x86 on simulators.  We build the ACATS on
m68k and bfin but don't have a simulator to run on
right now.

If you check out the CVS module gcc-testing, you will
find all the scripts used.  You can easily build an Ada
toolset from source with these.  The key step is that
you MUST have a native Ada compiler built from the
same source as the cross.  Sometimes you don't but
often enough it must match, that it isn't worth skipping.
> Are the vast majority of RTEMS users using C/C++ these days or are
> there a significant number of Ada users ?
>   
I personally know of real Ada applications on PowerPC,
x86, and ARM.
> Thanks,
>
> Simon.
>
>   


-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel.sherrill at OARcorp.com        On-Line Applications Research
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