This note covers some of the considerations that’ll apply when running Alire on macOS.

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).