[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: What about GCC support for ADA ?
From: |
Timothy Sample |
Subject: |
Re: What about GCC support for ADA ? |
Date: |
Fri, 21 Aug 2020 13:52:48 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) |
Hi divoplade,
divoplade <d@divoplade.fr> writes:
> Recently I was introduced to the ada programming language. [...]
> However, it is not installed with gcc-toolchain (I am on a foreign
> distribution).
>
> Are there deep reasons why it is disabled? [...] Is there a
> bootstrapping problem for instance?
That’s the issue, yes.
The GNAT frontend is written in Ada, and can only be built with GNAT.
What makes this worse is that there isn’t a pre-built binary available
for bootstrapping. Adacore Technologies offers a “community” version of
GNAT as a binary, but I think there might be licensing issues. [1]
I wrote code a long while ago that assembles a working GNAT binary from
Debian. It was the best approach I could come up with for getting a
well-established, free software version of GNAT as a binary. It might
be useful if someone wanted to make an Ada channel. The approach was a
little too ugly for Guix proper.
-- Tim
[1] I’m not sure I remember all the details. The Adacore version is
released under the GPL, but I think it lacks the GCC Runtime Library
Exception. This means that the code it produces would have to be
released under the GPL. This might be a problem for compiling GNU GNAT,
since it does contain the exception. Again, my memory is fuzzy here and
I encourage anyone interested to check for themselves.