What about GCC support for ADA ?

What about GCC support for ADA ?

[divoplade]

Hello all,

Recently I was introduced to the ada programming language. I wanted to
give it a try. As the FSF had a certain role in the development of a
compiler, I thought it would be best showcased in guix. However, it is
not installed with gcc-toolchain (I am on a foreign distribution).

Are there deep reasons why it is disabled? It seems to me that the
objective C variant is in a separate package, so maybe it could be as
simple as making a derivative package for ada. Is there a bootstrapping
problem for instance?

Best regards

divoplade

Re: What about GCC support for ADA ?

[Timothy Sample]

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.