Hi, On Thu, Jan 1, 2026 at 1:41 AM Paul Dufresne via Freedos-devel <[email protected]> wrote: > > I wanted to share a success story regarding the use of the Ada programming > language on FreeDOS.
While I never actively studied or used Ada for personal projects (yet??), I was somewhat curious in years past, trying to rebuild Gautier de Montmollin's Engine3D. > gcc346b.zip (GCC 3.4.6 core) > ada346b.zip (GNAT 3.4.6 compiler and runtime) Keep in mind these older versions probably don't support newer Ada things like Ada2005 (containers?) and Ada2012 (contracts?). Also, tasking is probably broken. (I haven't read all of your newer replies yet, but I see you noticed Gnatmake eventually breaks and was replaced upstream with ... GnatBuild??) > I bundled these ZIP files into a custom ISO under Linux using mkisofs: No Mtools or libguest whatevers? > I launched QEMU with sufficient memory for the Ada compiler: > qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 64 -hda freedos.img -cdrom install.iso 64 MB is not a lot for GCC, especially at higher optimization levels. > I am glad to confirm that in 2026, Ada remains a viable option for those of > us interested in modern-ish programming on a retro-DOS platform. Ada is from 1980 (or 1983 with fixes) originally. I'm not disagreeing it's "modern", but I wouldn't ignore other classic languages either just because of perceived age. In particular, Pascal heavily inspired Ada and is still nice (IMHO). I've actually been on a Modula-2 journey recently, but I spent years on Pascal (and Oberon) and various others. Anyways, good luck. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
