Re: Ada on iOS ? Or Swift...

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Saturday, 19 December 2015 11:05:00 UTC, v...@gmail.com  wrote:
> Hello Everybody,
> 
> I need to develop a navigation tool on an iPad, based on GPS localisation and speed measurement. There won't be any cartography involved but visualy it will be something similar to the compass app. It is a small development, so I cannot afford expensive tool support. To do that, I would love to use Ada :

Yup, would be nice.

> - Is it possible to have an Ada compiler for iOS ? I have read somewhere that GNAT had been ported to ARM. Even AdaCore is proposing a free bare board ARM cross compiler. But to use GNAT on iOS is still challenging. Is it possible to build a simple library, just for computing GPS data ? Is it possible to have tasking (I need at least to tasks : on for user interaction and the other for computation) ?

GCC has an ARM backend, GNAT sits on GCC, so it can be compiled for that backend. I plan to try to compile GCC for iOS, but haven't got around to it as I don't really know the proper command line options required, yet. The intention is to add it to my free-ada build scripts, with the first build be a cross compiler on my Linux box using NFS to mount the Mac's FS so I could access the files in the SDK there.

This is the first step, the next step is producing bindings to the various frameworks Apple has and making sure it's all legal, i.e. Apple doesn't get in the way.

iOS is based on the Mach kernel, same as OS X, it's a form of BSD unix, so having tasks should be trivial and afaik, it is supported. People here build GNAT for OS X.
 
Luke.