Re: ADA frontend?

[joel at OARcorp dot com]

On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Mike Stump wrote:

> > Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 19:19:48 +0100
> > From: Jamie Lokier <egcs@tantalophile.demon.co.uk>
> 
> > No, no, that'd be a major piece of work.
> > Far more useful would be a C backend for GCC.
> 
> I started out on this once...  Got far enough to play with it, but
> after a while, I came to the conclusion, it would be better to
> configure up for a m68k simulation environment, and then just run a
> simulator.  Your portable code is just vanilla m68k object code.
> (ANDIF anyone?)  The reason why this would work, is because the
> simulators are written in C.  So to bootstrap, you have an m68k Ada
> environment, and this can bootstrap anything that has a C compiler.
> 
> This already works today, just grab gdb and gcc and compile one up.
> (For people in the know: Right?)

I think the powerpc simulator (psim) in gdb right is more than sufficient
to do this now.  AFAIK there is no free m68k simulator powerful enough to
do this.  The sparc simulator (sis) in gdb would probably require some
enhancements to its IO architecture to use when bootstrapping.

FWIW I use psim and sis regularly to run automated tests on RTEMS.  Both
are very powerful.  I would love to have free simulators to test all RTEMS
ports.

--joel
Joel Sherrill                    Director of Research & Development
joel@OARcorp.com                 On-Line Applications Research
Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS  Huntsville AL 35805
   Support Available             (205) 722-9985