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From: Steve D on 14 Jul 2010 21:36
<usenet(a)scriptoriumdesigns.com> wrote in message
news:37da1783-b355-4d43-a9a8-7f0d4ba4da9c(a)t13g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> I'll just come out and say it - for a language that was designed for
> as much for embedded applications as for anything, it seems to be
> maddeningly difficult to actually get Ada on a modest embedded
> platform. By modest I mean low-end 32 bits, no MMU. ARM7 or Cortex
> Mx would be my first choice. I can be up and running on such a
> platform with C and a tasking library in a day (Rowley Crossworks,
> nice package). Why can't I do the same with Ada? Or rather, to avoid
> making this about me, why can't an embedded programmer - student,
> hobbyist or professional - who's heard about Ada and wants to give it
> a spin, including hard-realtime concurrency, just do it?
>
> If Ada fans (I include myself) want to see Ada get more exposure, this
> seems like not only a desirable step but a necessary one. I can run C
> on a thousand such boards, and I can't (AFAIK) run Ada on one.
>
> Maybe this is all available, and I just haven't found out where. Then
> that's a problem too, but I'll be happy to hear about it.
>
> All comments welcome.

The closest I have come is RTEMS http://www.rtems.com.

I haven't looked at it for a while, but there has generally been good Ada
support.

Regards,
Steve

From: Alex R. Mosteo on 15 Jul 2010 05:50
Steve D wrote:

> <usenet(a)scriptoriumdesigns.com> wrote in message
> news:37da1783-b355-4d43-a9a8-7f0d4ba4da9c(a)t13g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>> I'll just come out and say it - for a language that was designed for
>> as much for embedded applications as for anything, it seems to be
>> maddeningly difficult to actually get Ada on a modest embedded
>> platform. By modest I mean low-end 32 bits, no MMU. ARM7 or Cortex
>> Mx would be my first choice. I can be up and running on such a
>> platform with C and a tasking library in a day (Rowley Crossworks,
>> nice package). Why can't I do the same with Ada? Or rather, to avoid
>> making this about me, why can't an embedded programmer - student,
>> hobbyist or professional - who's heard about Ada and wants to give it
>> a spin, including hard-realtime concurrency, just do it?
>>
>> If Ada fans (I include myself) want to see Ada get more exposure, this
>> seems like not only a desirable step but a necessary one. I can run C
>> on a thousand such boards, and I can't (AFAIK) run Ada on one.
>>
>> Maybe this is all available, and I just haven't found out where. Then
>> that's a problem too, but I'll be happy to hear about it.
>>
>> All comments welcome.
>
> The closest I have come is RTEMS http://www.rtems.com.
>
> I haven't looked at it for a while, but there has generally been good Ada
> support.

Hanging down under this RTEMS thread...

May be there's some useful pointer in this old thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/browse_thread/thread/75412f14b0c43a2d/17482244d75fb19a

Also there's MaRTE OS, but I don't know if it targets anything else besides
x86:

http://marte.unican.es
From: Georg Bauhaus on 17 Jul 2010 12:29
On 7/17/10 10:45 AM, MRE wrote:
> Personally I have a
> project up and
> running where three of my students write code in Ada for AVR (8-Bit
> and 32-Bit).
> You can find decent Ada cross-compilers for both and that's what I
> use.
>
> If you ask me however to do a similar thing for say MSP430, sorry I
> can't. I don't
> have a clue how to generate the cross-compiler for Ada and I don't
> know how to
> write / adapt the Ravenscar-Runtime. Furthermore I just don't have the
> time to lern
> it and I lack the ressources to have my students do it.

Is there, in your view, a way to approach the subject as
a cooperative effort, touchy as it may be, with the simpler
goal of gradually improving an AVR run-time system and the tools?
Maybe making it portable where possible so more vendors
become interested?

If PR noise and bureaucratic overhead have shown to be
counterproductive, maybe occasional produce from here
and there is more effective in helping the effort catch on.
An AVR teaching environment could then become visible even
on the radar of those departments where a preference is
for more abstract computer models.
From: usenet on 17 Jul 2010 20:26
On Jul 17, 9:29 am, Georg Bauhaus <rm-host.bauh...(a)maps.futureapps.de>
wrote:
> Is there, in your view, a way to approach the subject as
> a cooperative effort, touchy as it may be, with the simpler
> goal of gradually improving an AVR run-time system and the tools?
> Maybe making it portable where possible so more vendors
> become interested?

I think getting an easy-to-use Ada on AVR (a nice and easy to obtain
chip, and available in DIP for budget prototyping) would be great.
Any form of tasking would probably be too much to ask, but maybe not
on the bigger members of the family.

Every bit as desirable IMO would be Ada on ARM7 and/or Cortex Mx, with
Ravenscar tasking. The possibilities with Ada on e.g. http://mbed.org/nxp/lpc1768/
are very enticing.

Whatever the software engineering advantages of Ada (and they are
many), I think the high-level concurrency might be the single biggest
initial attraction to a lot of embedded folks.

> If PR noise and bureaucratic overhead have shown to be
> counterproductive, maybe occasional produce from here
> and there is more effective in helping the effort catch on.
> An AVR teaching environment could then become visible even
> on the radar of those departments where a preference is
> for more abstract computer models.

Call it the AAA project, AVR, ARM and Ada.
From: Simon Wright on 18 Jul 2010 06:15
usenet(a)scriptoriumdesigns.com writes:

> I think getting an easy-to-use Ada on AVR (a nice and easy to obtain
> chip, and available in DIP for budget prototyping) would be great.
> Any form of tasking would probably be too much to ask, but maybe not
> on the bigger members of the family.

GNAT GPL 2010 mentions AVR --
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/
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