Hi divoplade, divoplade <[email protected]> writes:
> Recently I was introduced to the ada programming language. [...] > However, it is not installed with gcc-toolchain (I am on a foreign > distribution). > > Are there deep reasons why it is disabled? [...] Is there a > bootstrapping problem for instance? That’s the issue, yes. The GNAT frontend is written in Ada, and can only be built with GNAT. What makes this worse is that there isn’t a pre-built binary available for bootstrapping. Adacore Technologies offers a “community” version of GNAT as a binary, but I think there might be licensing issues. [1] I wrote code a long while ago that assembles a working GNAT binary from Debian. It was the best approach I could come up with for getting a well-established, free software version of GNAT as a binary. It might be useful if someone wanted to make an Ada channel. The approach was a little too ugly for Guix proper. -- Tim [1] I’m not sure I remember all the details. The Adacore version is released under the GPL, but I think it lacks the GCC Runtime Library Exception. This means that the code it produces would have to be released under the GPL. This might be a problem for compiling GNU GNAT, since it does contain the exception. Again, my memory is fuzzy here and I encourage anyone interested to check for themselves.
