Re: Ada on iOS ? Or Swift...

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 02:16:24 UTC, David Botton  wrote:

> > I need to develop a navigation tool on an iPad
> It will have to be an app with a server side, but using Gnoga it is possible.
> 
> > - Is it possible to have an Ada compiler for iOS?
> Not currently realistic. The best we can hope for when it comes to GCC/GNAT is someone redoing the work Marcus did and releasing as GMGPL the runtime for .NET then you can use the many tools to convert .NET to either real iOS code or to ASM.js
> 
> If that ever happens I'll update Gnoga to work client side as well for ASM.js / .NET (A simple thing)

What are you talking about?

AFAIK, GCC  is capable of building for iOS as Apple originally used GCC for iOS development before Clang.  So, in a word, yes, it is possible to have GCC and GNAT target iOS. We just need a few things:

1) the incantation to build the thing
2) generators to build bindings into ObjC/Swift - Swift uses the ObjC runtime, the ObjC runtime is based on C so should be easy to bind to.

It is realistic because Apple did the work, it's doable. You can use the FSF as a base, just whether Apple provided the necessary patches back to FSF or not, if not, you have to find them.

Luke.