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Re: C as target platform?
- From: David Brown <gcc at davidb dot org>
- To: Robert Dewar <dewar at gnat dot com>
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, helmut dot zeisel at liwest dot at
- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 09:35:11 -0700
- Subject: Re: C as target platform?
- References: <20020823102236.867D8F28ED@nile.gnat.com>
On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 06:22:36AM -0400, Robert Dewar wrote:
> In fact to port GNAT to a brand new architecture, the basic cross port is
> a trivial part of the work, perhaps 5% or less. Ada is not C, and just getting
> a non-tasking bootstrap without the tools and without the run-time library
> (particularly the tasking support) is a trivially easy part of the porting
> process for a new architecture in our experience.
A while back, even before GNAT was integrated with the GCC source tree,
I managed to build a cross compiler for GNAT on an x86 linux machine
that targeted and ARM7. That wasn't very hard at all. The hard part
was writing enough of a runtime to have a useful system.
It probably took me less than a day to get it compiling. It is even
easier with the code integrated, since it usually just builds. That's
with the lack of real clean support for a cross compiler, I had to do
quite a bit by hand.
Of course, my target couldn't hope to ever host gcc itself (it has no
filesystem, a small amount of ram, and the code goes in ROM).
Dave Brown