Re: Ichbiah 2022 compiler mode

On 2024-09-12 15:36, Kevin Chadwick wrote:

 

If Ada did not have tasks with priorities, most of the Ada applications I have worked on in my life would have had to avoid Ada tasking and retreat to using some other real-time kernel, with ad-hoc mapping of the kernels's threads to Ada procedures.
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 Counter intuitively it is possible that this is holding Ada back. A lot of
Ada code cannot run without some fairly complex runtime support due to
tasks, protected objects, finalization etc.. Runtimes have to be developed
for each chip instead of each cpu.

True, however an Ada RTS can implement many of the tasking features with moderate effort on top of non-Ada real-time kernels such as FreeRTOS, VxWorks, etc., as AdaCore have done for some kernels. At least for the Ravenscar and Jorvik profiles. AIUI, the processor-specific stuff is then mainly in the kernel, not in the RTS.

If you need advanced multi core support then using an OS seems like a more
suitable situation to be in to me.

Using a large OS like Linux would not be acceptable for many embedded systems. Fortunately the smaller real-time kernels are adding multi-core support too.
The great advantage of using the standard Ada tasking feature, special syntax and all, is that your embedded Ada program can then be executed on a PC or other non-embedded computer, for testing or other purposes, tasking and all. It can also be analysed by static-analysis tools such as AdaControl for race conditions and other tasking-sensitive issues.