Nintendo DS homebrew with Ada?

Question

Note: I know very little about the GCC toolchain, so this question may not make much sense.

Since GCC includes an Ada front end, and it can emit ARM, and devKitPro is based on GCC, is it possible to use Ada instead of C/C++ for writing code on the DS?

Edit: It seems that the target that devKitARM uses is arm-eabi.

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: I don't know Ada)

Possibly.

You might be able to build devKitPro to use Ada, however, the pre-provided binaries (at least for OS X) do not have Ada support compiled in.

However, you will probably find yourself writing tons of C "glue" code to interface with the various hardware registers and the like.

Answer 2

devkitPro is not a toolchain, compiler or indeed any software package. The toolchain used to target the DS is devkitARM, one of the toolchains provided by devkitPro.

It may be possible to build the ada compiler but I doubt very much if you'll ever manage to get anything useful running on the DS itself. devkitPro will certainly never provide an ada compiler as part of the packages we produce.

Answer 3

Yes it is possible, see my project https://github.com/Lucretia/tamp and build the cross compiler as per my script. You would then be able to target NDS using Ada. I have build a basic RTS as well which will provide you with local exception handling.

And @Martin Beckett, why do think Ada is aimed squarely at DoD stuff? They dropped the mandate years ago and Ada is easily usable for any project, you do realise that Ada is a general purpose programming language don't you?