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.

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 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 SPARK (i.e. gnatprove) against an FSF GCC.

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

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).

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.

This is a note on getting set up to work on a Crazyflie 2.0.

After unpacking, testing and assembling the drone, you need to get some software to talk to it.

We probably feel downhearted if we need to use the debugger to find out what's wrong with our Ada code.

Under those circumstances, we feel even more frustrated if the debugger doesn't work!

This is exactly what has happened with gdb and macOS Sierra.

I wanted to update Audacity, but the 2.1.2 version (from the official download site) wouldn’t run: I got can’t open application Audacity.

I downloaded a new version of eclipseArduino(Arduino development within Eclipse). After unpacking and moving to /Applications, I get the message

"eclipseArduino" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

Huh.

After a lot of poking around, I found this:

1. Open Gatekeeper settings located in System Preferences > Security & Privacy.
2. Set Allow applications downloaded from: to Anywhereand confirm by pressing Allow From Anywhere.
3. Run the application.
4. Once the application has been successfully launched, it no longer goes through Gatekeeper; so, restore Gatekeeper settings to the default option Mac App Store and identified developers after successfully launching the application.

This is a note on overcoming a problem connecting to my STM32F429I-DISCOboard.

AdaCore's doinstall is an excellent way of installing the compiler where you want to. Unfortunately, GCC 4.9 uses the shared libgcc_s.1.dylib, which has no @rpath-type constructs, and so the compiler executables expect to find libgcc_s.1.dylib in the place it was built for. (Not to mention libstdc++.6.dylib.)

These notes describe building GNAT GPL 2014 for the Cortex M4 on Mac OS X.

My target board was the STM32M4F29I Discovery.