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Ada language compilation for P8X32A? — Parallax Forums

Ada language compilation for P8X32A?

WossnameWossname Posts: 174
edited 2019-10-08 08:16 in Propeller 1
I've been learning Ada lately and was wondering if there was any possibility of writing small Ada programs to run on the Prop 1. To my mind the Prop seems well suited to this language due to the built-in real-time and tasking features of the language. Coupled with some external ram and a large eeprom this could be quite a formidable system.

Has anyone managed to do this?

Comments

  • AJLAJL Posts: 517
    Wossname wrote: »
    I've been learning Ada lately and was wondering if there was any possibility of writing small Ada programs to run on the Prop 1. To my mind the Prop seems well suited to this language due to the built-in real-time and tasking features of the language. Coupled with some external ram and a large eeprom this could be quite a formidable system.

    Has anyone managed to do this?

    If this hasn't ever been done would anyone be interested in collaborating on a project to make this a reality?

    SimpleIDE uses GCC, and there's a current effort by @ntosme2 to bring compilation for Propeller 2 up to date with a current GCC build. Would appropriate builds of GNAT for the versions of GCC in use be able to take advantage of this work to get you most of the way to ADA on the Propeller family?
  • jmgjmg Posts: 15,173
    edited 2019-10-08 08:53
    Python is running on P2, using RISC V emulation JIT compiler, so ADA might do the same on P2, P1 is likely too small to be useful.

    Smaller than ADA, could be Project Oberon, which is largely self-compiling ?. Another possible for P2 ?
  • WossnameWossname Posts: 174
    AJL wrote: »
    Would appropriate builds of GNAT for the versions of GCC in use be able to take advantage of this work to get you most of the way to ADA on the Propeller family?

    Yes, I'd say that would do the trick. I'll see if I can get in touch with ntosme2.
    jmg wrote: »
    P1 is likely too small to be useful.
    Possibly yes, but there have been successful builds of "avr-ada" for atmel microcontrollers including the Mega 328 (https://sourceforge.net/p/avr-ada/wiki/Home/ from years ago seems to be defunct now). Ada is nice because you can turn off language features rather easily (see "pragma" statements and "Ravenscar profile") to reduce the size of the memory footprint. One thing the P1 has that the AVR family does not is hardware concurrency and real-time hardware mutexing, which is a absolute dream for Ada.



  • RossHRossH Posts: 5,462
    I love Ada! My second favorite language! :)

    Ada on the P2 is definitely a real possibility. But (sadly) probably not on the P1.
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