Generating Ada Bindings for C and C++ headers

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26 Generating Ada Bindings for C and C++ headers

GNAT now comes with a binding generator for C and C++ headers which is intended to do 95% of the tedious work of generating Ada specs from C or C++ header files.

Note that this capability is not intended to generate 100% correct Ada specs, and will is some cases require manual adjustments, although it can often be used out of the box in practice.

Some of the known limitations include:

only very simple character constant macros are translated into Ada constants. Function macros (macros with arguments) are partially translated as comments, to be completed manually if needed.
some extensions (e.g. vector types) are not supported
pointers to pointers or complex structures are mapped to System.Address
identifiers with identical name (except casing) will generate compilation errors (e.g. shm_get vs SHM_GET).

The code generated is using the Ada 2005 syntax, which makes it easier to interface with other languages than previous versions of Ada.