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From: Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com>
To: divoplade <d@divoplade.fr>
Cc: help-guix@gnu.org
Subject: Re: What about GCC support for ADA ?
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2020 13:52:48 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87blj3ga33.fsf@ngyro.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <6827422bf66578e4f17ade3a7b35c547e934ca9e.camel@divoplade.fr> (divoplade's message of "Fri, 21 Aug 2020 10:59:54 +0200")

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.


      reply	other threads:[~2020-08-21 17:58 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-08-21  8:59 What about GCC support for ADA ? divoplade
2020-08-21 17:52 ` Timothy Sample [this message]

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