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Learn something for 2025?

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DiTBho:
- your "language" myC is nothing but a debug tool for the C language!
nobody will ever use its extensions nor consider it a programming language ... -
the worst thing I was said by the end of the 2024

So true, in the end.

Good luck getting Ada working on MIPS32 and MIPS5++ ...

SiliconWizard:
The tooling is certainly one important issue for anyone who really wants to use Ada. If you're on x86_64, it's not a problem though, and toolchains are available either from AdaCore, or from your Linux distro if you're on Linux. I find it odd that Gentoo apparently doesn't have an existing package for that. Many other distros do. Otherwise, one can download ready-made binaries from AdaCore. They have binaries for RISC-V and ARM apparently too, but I didn't try them. I think these are "native" tools though, meaning, not cross-compilers. Building a cross-compiler for Ada for any other target than x86_64 looks like a bit of a mess. To say the least.

But for those that can use it on x86_64, I say that's worth a try. If just to discover the language, learn something, even if you don't routinely use it afterwards. Judging not just from this thread, but from comments one can hear everywhere, a majority of people seem to have little clue what Ada really is and what it has to offer as a language, with a lot of prejudice. The last standard revision is 2022.

As to using one's own language, it can certainly be a solution in some cases. Being dependent on maintainers from a large organization leads to situations where you're usually out of luck if your target is not supported. Independence is great. It has a cost, though.

DiTBho:
Gentoo has a gnat ebuild, which, as I wrote above, needs a bootstrapper to be compiled because the default gcc toolchain does not have Ada in the gcc-enabled-languages.

I don't know why, already suggested to include Ada, no dice.

DiTBho:
Ghdl depends on gnat.

Imagine your boss invests 5k euro in a modern 8 cores PPC64le server, and ... Ops, can't compile ghdl because I don't have a working ada compiler.

Fixed this situation for HPPA2, partially solved for ppc64le.

System76 is now promoting a new arm64le multicore server. Interesting hw, good price. It would be more interesting with ghdl running.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: DiTBho on January 06, 2025, 12:03:52 am ---Gentoo has a gnat ebuild, which, as I wrote above, needs a bootstrapper to be compiled because the default gcc toolchain does not have Ada in the gcc-enabled-languages.

I don't know why, already suggested to include Ada, no dice.

--- End quote ---

Ah yes, then it's like most other distros. It's just that as a source-based distro, you feel the pain of the build, bootstrapping included. Others with binary packages do the same. The base GCC packages usually don't have Ada enabled. They rarely enable more than C and C++. Then there are additional packages for adding Ada support, or D support. The reason is probably that since there are so few users of Ada, the extra build time (and space for binary distributions) is not warranted for most users. I bet many would get angry on Gentoo if the Ada front-end was automatically built when they emerged gcc.

As to supporting more targets, I don't know how hard it is. Isn't it mainly a matter of writing runtimes? (But that's not a trivial task apparently.)
I've seen that there was a Ada front-end for LLVM, didn't try though. I don't know if it supports more targets. Possibly so? https://github.com/AdaCore/gnat-llvm

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