work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Optikos]

Why doesn't this work-in-progress unfinished Ada compiler come up in conversation here on c.l.a more often?  It seems to be in a state of active development with commits in recent months.

https://github.com/pchapin/augusta

Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Lucretia]

On Thursday, 20 June 2019 04:25:22 UTC+1, Optikos  wrote:
> Why doesn't this work-in-progress unfinished Ada compiler come up in conversation here on c.l.a more often?  It seems to be in a state of active development with commits in recent months.
> 
> https://github.com/pchapin/augusta

When I last looked at it, a few months back, there wasn't much going on except clean ups of comments.

Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Optikos]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 5:20:36 AM UTC-5, Lucretia wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 June 2019 04:25:22 UTC+1, Optikos  wrote:
> > Why doesn't this work-in-progress unfinished Ada compiler come up in conversation here on c.l.a more often?  It seems to be in a state of active development with commits in recent months.
> > 
> > https://github.com/pchapin/augusta
> 
> When I last looked at it, a few months back, there wasn't much going on except clean ups of comments.

Some noncommentary development resumed 4 months ago after the importation of the source code into the SBT build environment.  Since then, check-in comments such as “Some work on the LLVM code generator. Also fixed a few easy warnings.” and “Fixed the structure of the liveness analysis method.” indicate incrementally more serious activity in recent months.

I cannot find a license stated anywhere regarding Augusta (although I have only done spot-checking here & there).  Under which license is Augusta distributed?  With Augusta intended to be the OpenWatcom Ada Compiler (WAC) as stated in the webpage linked below, I would assume that the OpenWatcom license would be utilized for Augusta, although the LLVM-backend activity in recent months instead of the expected OpenWatcom-backend activity might indicate a change away from this intent to be the WAC.
https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/tree/master/wac

Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Lucretia]

On Thursday, 20 June 2019 12:35:03 UTC+1, Optikos  wrote:

> Some noncommentary development resumed 4 months ago after the importation of the source code into the SBT build environment.  Since then, check-in comments such as “Some work on the LLVM code generator. Also fixed a few easy warnings.” and “Fixed the structure of the liveness analysis method.” indicate incrementally more serious activity in recent months.

You could email him and ask him to update here, he does frequent this group.

> I cannot find a license stated anywhere regarding Augusta (although I have only done spot-checking here & there).  Under which license is Augusta 

https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/search?q=license&unscoped_q=license


> distributed?  With Augusta intended to be the OpenWatcom Ada Compiler (WAC) as stated in the webpage linked below, I would assume that the OpenWatcom license would be utilized for Augusta, although the LLVM-backend activity in recent months instead of the expected OpenWatcom-backend activity might indicate a change away from this intent to be the WAC.
> https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/tree/master/wac

As the readme says, this is a separate project to Augusta which is meant to use the OpenWatcom back end and is written in C++.

I really wish he would separate out his projects in this repo, there are 3 compilers and a bunch of tools which could be separate and I think slinging them all in one just confuses people.

Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Optikos]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 6:49:06 AM UTC-5, Lucretia wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 June 2019 12:35:03 UTC+1, Optikos  wrote:
> 
> > Some noncommentary development resumed 4 months ago after the importation of the source code
> > into the SBT build environment.  Since then, check-in comments such as “Some work on the LLVM
> > code generator. Also fixed a few easy warnings.” and “Fixed the structure of the liveness analysis
> > method.” indicate incrementally more serious activity in recent months.
> 
> You could email him and ask him to update here, he does frequent this group.

I will eventually if he doesn't post-in-reply soon.

> > I cannot find a license stated anywhere regarding Augusta (although I have only done spot-checking
> > here & there).  Under which license is Augusta distributed?
> 
> https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/search?q=license&unscoped_q=license

Yes, I did that search too, but if you notice in the search results that these are licenses inherited from importations of other projects.  It seems at 1st glance that SLEM (LGPLed library) is linked to Augusta and thus the LGPL does not spread outside of SLEM.  The WAC pieces borrowed from OpenWatcom (Sybase OpenWatcom-licensed) do not spread elsewhere.  The remaining search results are for documentation under the GNU documentation license.

As I stated before, there seems to be no indication what the license is for Augusta proper (i.e., the executable), outside of the SLEM library, outside of WAC, and outside of documentation.

> > With Augusta intended to be the OpenWatcom Ada Compiler (WAC) as stated in the
> > webpage linked below, I would assume that the OpenWatcom license would be utilized for Augusta,
> > although the LLVM-backend activity in recent months instead of the expected OpenWatcom-backend
> > activity might indicate a change away from this intent to be the WAC.
> > https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/tree/master/wac
> 
> As the readme says, this is a separate project to Augusta which is meant to use the OpenWatcom back
> end and is written in C++.

Yes, but if contributed to OpenWatcom, I am under the belief that they require the entirety of the source code to be licensed under the Sybase OpenWatcom License.

> I really wish he would separate out his projects in this repo, there are 3 compilers and a bunch of tools
> which could be separate and I think slinging them all in one just confuses people.

I concur.  If he continues with one repository, Peter Chapin could reorganize the directory structure so that at the top level are the differently-licensed portions, each with their own COPYING or LICENSE file, so that it is clear which portion is LGPL, which portion is Sybase OpenWatcom, and which portion is some other license.  (I think that documentation is obviously documentation and doesn't need its own top-level directory despite being licensed under yet another license:  the GNU Free Documentation License.)

It appears as though Augusta is not intended to be licensed under the GPL though.  Without any copyright notice at all on Augusta proper, some legal jurisdictions would default to all rights-to-copy reserved by Peter Chapin, whereas in other legal jurisdictions the default would be public domain.  Peter should clean that ambiguity up.

Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Optikos]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 6:49:06 AM UTC-5, Lucretia wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 June 2019 12:35:03 UTC+1, Optikos  wrote:
> 
> > Some noncommentary development resumed 4 months ago after the importation of the source code into
> > the SBT build environment.  Since then, check-in comments such as “Some work on the LLVM code
> > generator. Also fixed a few easy warnings.” and “Fixed the structure of the liveness analysis method.”
> > indicate incrementally more serious activity in recent months.
> 
> You could email him and ask him to update here, he does frequent this group.

https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/issues/1
I submitted an issue at GitHub requesting that he clarify which license Augusta proper (and Dragon and Tiger, if differently-licensed) is distributed publicly via at GitHub.  I mentioned these postings at comp.lang.ada in recent days, so perhaps Peter will notice the existence of these postings now.

Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Optikos]

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 10:25:22 PM UTC-5, Optikos wrote:
> Why doesn't this work-in-progress unfinished Ada compiler come up in conversation here on c.l.a more often?  It seems to be in a state of active development with commits in recent months.
> 
> https://github.com/pchapin/augusta

If Augusta proper (as opposed to the LGPLed SLEM library underneath Augusta) turns out to be licensed by a permissive license (or public domain), then the Apache2.0-licensed Scala Native compiler might be a technique to derive a nonGPL/nonRuntimeLibraryException open-source (or even closed-source) competitor to GNAT that targets LLVM (and hence usable on iOS Apple devices and likewise hence participate in Microsoft's ever-increasing embrace of Clang).  One could either:

1) compile Augusta via the Scala Native compiler to avoid being restricted to the pugnacious JVM bytecode, or

2) (via the Apache2.0 license on Scala Native, write a tree transducer-based generator of Ada source code equivalent from the Scala source code, as the multistage programming model (i.e., code generator of code generator of code generator) that curiously recurs in most compilers (including GNAT's GIMPLE tree-transducer).

https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Perhaps this means that we should help Peter Chapin out some as co-contributors (beyond what effort he receives from his CS students, which seems focused on some of the test-suite source code for Augusta).