[avr-gcc-list] [Announce] AVR-Ada V0.1 released

[Ebert, Rolf]

We are proud to announce the first release of AVR-Ada, one of the first 
GCC based Ada compilers targeting 8-bit microcontrolers.

You can get the project description and some (limited) documentation at

     avr-ada.sourceforge.net
     
The SF development pages with the download section are at

     www.sourceforge.net/projects/avr-ada
     

AVR-Ada is available in source form only.  Binary packages of the 
cross compiler for Linux and Windows are expected to appear with 
future releases of cdk4avr (cdk4avr.sourceforge.net) and WinAVR 
(winavr.sourceforge.net).

Feel free to join the mailing list at 

     https://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/avr-ada-devel.  
     
It has quite low traffic.


Please use SF's bug reporting system for guiding future development 
of AVR-Ada.


Goal
====

The goal of the AVR-Ada project is make the gcc based Ada compiler GNAT
available for the AVR microcontrollers.

More specifically the project wants to provide 

 -  a working compiler based on the existing AVR and Ada support in gcc
 -  a minimalistic Ada runtime system
 -  a useful AVR specific support library


Status
======

Although the compiler and the library have considerably improved in
the last few months they still have some problems.  Do not base a
commercial project on this tool chain.  Or if you do, do it at your
own risk :-).

Most of Ada's static features can be used with AVR-Ada.
A typical Ada run time system is practically non-existant (and will
probably never be).  As a consequence we have to sacrifice some of the
typical useful Ada features like run time checks, exception handling,
timing commands (no delay statement), tasking, etc.  Some of them are
on our todo list for future releases, though.

We provide an Avr package hierarchy with some useful type and
interface definitions and most importantly the necessary definitions
for most AVR parts.

Some sample programs in the apps/ directory show how to use the
compiler and the library.  This includes the tutorial program from
the avr-libc distrubution translated to Ada.

The documentation is very low and consists only of the pages at
avr-ada.sourceforge.net.  A copy of the pages is in the directory
AVR-Ada/web/ for offline reading.