Background

This exercise was prompted by the need for Scripted Testing to be supported by – as far as possible – code generation. The need is for the public or interfacing view of a supporting part (domain) of a system to be able to log calls made to it and to provide values on calls to it, using a scripting mechanism.

This article discusses various issues rebuilding a demonstrator intended for the BBC micro:bit (version 1.3b) after an interval of several years.

Once you’ve downloaded Alire and begun the Getting Started tutorial, how do you go about actually writing Ada?

These are notes on building GCC 12.2.0 and GNAT tools for Apple silicon.

There were two main problems:

• the base package was built on an Intel machine (lockheed - named after Shadowcat’s companion dragon), running Monterey (macOS 12).
• the build machine, an M1 mac Mini (temeraire - named after Naomi Novik’s dragon) was by this time running Ventura (macOS 13), but I wanted to make sure that users could continue to run on Monterey.

This note is about an issue encountered creating a very thin Ada binding to libusb (1.0.26).

This exploration came about because of trying to add GNAT Math Extensions to Alire.

This note is about configuring GCC on macOS so that your built compiler can be used independently of which Software Development Kit (SDK) is installed.

This is a note about building GNAT-LLVM on macOS.

This is a note about building SPARK (i.e. gnatprove) against an FSF GCC.

This note is about some difficulties using shared libraries (.dylibs) on macOS.

People are having much trouble with GtkAda on Big Sur, so I thought "why not try building Gtk?" - as here.

Unfortunately, it's just too complicated & runs into so many problems that I give up.

This is a note about preparing a pull request (PR) for a Github repository. As much as anything, it’s to stop me having to page back through my lab notebook to find out how I did it last time …

Recently, on the Gitter Ada Programming Language lobby, there have been discussions on cross-compiling for Cortex M micro-controllers, specifically the BBC micro:bit, using the Raspberry Pi.

TL;DR: it's not going to be easy, unfortunately. Maybe later (or earlier?) Raspbian releases will help.

This post is based on the README from the corresponding Github repository.

That repository attempts to cope with expected changes in Apple’s approach to software development kits, specifically where to find the system headers (you’d expect /usr/include).

This note is about using Segger J-Link software to help debug code on a BBC micro:bit.

After you've installed Xcode (or, my preference, the Command Line Tools via xcode-select -install) so that you can install and use GNAT, you may expect to be able to compile C code too.

Mojave may surprise you with

$ gcc casing.c -o casing
casing.c:1:10: fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
    1 | #include <stdio.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~
      compilation terminated.

The reason, according to this question and its answers, is that Apple's developer tools, in particular the clang compiler, know where to find the include files under /Library/Developer; GCC doesn't (I'm sure it could be made to, but ...) and so we have to add an extra step to install them in the normal place:

$ sudo installer -pkg /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg -target /
Password:
installer: Package name is macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14
installer: Installing at base path /
installer: The install was successful.

Apple's software development tools are based on LLVM, and Apple don't seem to feel it necessary to keep GCC and friends up to date with changes in the Apple tools or security policies.

GDB has been particularly affected by this. You can see why a tool which is capable of interacting with running programs would have to be treated with caution.