Playing with Ada on Windows

This repository gathers Ada code examples coming from various websites and books. It also includes several build scripts (bash scripts, batch files, Make scripts) for experimenting with Ada on a Windows machine.

Akka, C++, COBOL, Dafny, Dart, Deno, Docker, Erlang, Flix, Golang, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, TruffleSqueak, WiX Toolset and Zig are other topics we are continuously monitoring.

☛ Read the document "Ada Comparison Chart" for an overview of evolution of the major features of the Ada programming language.

Project dependencies

This project depends on the following external software for the Microsoft Windows platform:

• Git 2.47 (release notes)
• GNAT CE 2021 (announcement)

Optionally one may also install the following software:

• AdaControl 1.22
• Alire 2.0 ¹ (changes)
• ConEmu 2023 (release notes)
• GNAT CE 2019 ²
• GWindows 2024 (release notes)
• MSYS2 2024 ³ (changelog)
• Visual Studio Code 1.95 (release notes)

☛ Installation policy
When possible we install software from a Zip archive rather than via a Windows installer. In our case we defined C:\opt\ as the installation directory for optional software tools (in reference to the /opt/ directory on Unix).

For instance our development environment looks as follows (December 2024) ⁴:

C:\opt\adactl\       ( 79 MB)
C:\opt\ConEmu\       ( 26 MB)
C:\opt\Git\          (391 MB)
C:\opt\GNAT\2019\    (1.1 GB)
C:\opt\GNAT\2021\    (2.8 GB)
C:\opt\GWindows\     ( 15 MB)
C:\opt\msys64\       (2.8 GB)
C:\opt\VSCode\       (381 MB)

🔎 Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run git.exe from the command line (as well as over 250 Unix commands like awk, diff, file, grep, more, mv, rmdir, sed and wc).

Directory structure ▴

This project has the following directory structure :

aunit-examples\{README.md, calculator, etc.}
bin\
docs\
examples\{README.md, Greetings, etc.}
gwindows-examples\{README.md, tutorial1, etc.}
hac-examples{README.md, Ackermann, ..}
intro-to-ada\{README.md, Greet, Week, etc.}
pchapin-examples{README.md, Rationals, Tagged, Vowels, etc.}
shvets-examples\{README.md, ch02, ch03, etc.}
QUICKREF.md
README.md
RESOURCES.md
setenv.bat
SETUP.md

where

• directory aunit-examples\ contains Ada code examples from GitHub project AdaCore/aunit.
• directory bin\ contains utility batch files.
• directory docs\ contains Ada related documents.
• directory examples\ contains Ada code examples grabbed from various websites.
• directory gwindows-examples\ contains GNAVI code examples (see README.md)
• directory hac-examples\ contains Ada code examples from the HAC project.
• directory intro-to-ada\ contains Ada code examples from AdaCore's course Introduction to Ada.
• directory pchapin-examples\ contains Ada code examples from Peter's Ada tutorial.
• directory shvets-examples\ contains Ada code examples from Shvets's book Beginning Ada Programming.
• file QUICKREF.md gathers Ada hints and tips.
• file README.md is the Markdown document for this page.
• file RESOURCES.md gathers Ada related informations.
• file setenv.bat is the batch script for setting up our environment.
• file SETUP.md gathers information about setting up our environment.

We also define a virtual drive – e.g. drive W: – in our working environment in order to reduce/hide the real path of our project directory (see article "Windows command prompt limitation" from Microsoft Support).

🔎 We use the Windows external command subst to create virtual drives; for instance:

> subst W: %USERPROFILE%\workspace\ada-examples

In the next section we give a brief description of the batch files present in this project.

Batch commands

setenv.bat ⁵

We execute command setenv.bat once to setup our development environment; it makes external tools such as diff.exe, git.exe and make.exe directly available from the command prompt.

> setenv
Tool versions:
   adactl 1.22r16c, alr 2.0.2, gcc 13.3.0, gnat Community 2021,
   Gwindows 13-Apr-2024, make 4.4.1, code 1.95.3,
   git 2.47.1, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1)

> where code diff git make
C:\opt\VSCode\Code.exe
C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\diff.exe
C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
C:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\make.exe

Footnotes ▴

[1] Alire ↩

Alire is a source-based package manager for the Ada and SPARK programming languages.

We install Alire from the Zip file alr-2.0.2-bin-x86_64-windows.zip; the archive contains the two files bin\alr.exe and LICENSE.txt (GNU license). We simply copy them to directory %GNAT_HOME%\bin\ (in our case GNAT_HOME=C:\opt\GNAT\2021\).

[2] GNAT 2019 ↩

GNAT CE 2019 is the latest version of GNAT CE that supports ASIS, which is required for running AdaControl 1.22.

[3] GNAT tools in MSYS2 ↩

The MSYS64 software distribution also includes GNAT tools whose versions may differ from the GNAT CE distribution:

  > where /r c:\opt\msys64 gnat.exe gnatmake.exe
  c:\opt\msys64\mingw64\bin\gnat.exe
  c:\opt\msys64\mingw64\bin\gnatmake.exe
   
  > where /r c:\opt\msys64 gcc.exe make.exe pacman.exe
  c:\opt\msys64\mingw64\bin\gcc.exe
  c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\make.exe
  c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\pacman.exe

gnat.exe/gnatmake.exe

  > c:\opt\msys64\mingw64\bin\gnat.exe --version | findstr GNAT
  GNAT 14.2.0
 
  > c:\opt\msys64\mingw64\bin\gnatmake.exe --version | findstr GNAT
  GNATMAKE 14.2.0

gcc.exe/make.exe

  > c:\opt\msys64\mingw64\bin\gcc.exe --version | findstr gcc
  gcc.exe (Rev6, Built by MSYS2 project) 14.2.0
   
  > c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\make.exe --version | findstr Make
  GNU Make 4.4.1

pacman.exe helps us to keep our MSYS2 package mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-ada up-to-date:

   > c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\pacman.exe -Syu mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-ada
   :: Synchronizing package databases...
   [...]
   :: Running post-transaction hooks...
   (1/3) Compiling GSettings XML schema files...
   (2/3) Updating icon theme caches...
   (3/3) Updating the info directory file...

[4] Downloads ↩

In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):

adactl-1.22r16c-exe_windows_ce2019.zip              ( 26 MB)
alr-2.0.2-bin-x86_64-windows.zip                    ( 11 MB)
ConEmuPack.230724.7z                                (  5 MB)
gnat-community-2019-20190517-x86_64-windows-bin.exe (380 MB)
gnat-2021-20210519-x86_64-windows64-bin.exe         (562 MB)
gtkada-2021-x86_64-windows64-bin.exe                ( 59 MB)
GWindows Archive 13-Apr-2024.zip                    (  4 MB)
msys2-x86_64-20240727.exe                           ( 83 MB)
PortableGit-2.47.1-64-bit.7z.exe                    ( 46 MB)
VSCode-win32-x64-1.95.3.zip                         (131 MB)

[5] setenv.bat usage ↩

Batch file setenv.bat has specific environment variables set that enable us to use command-line developer tools more easily.

It is similar to the setup scripts described on the page "Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt and Developer PowerShell" of the Visual Studio online documentation.

For instance we can quickly check that the two scripts Launch-VsDevShell.ps1 and VsDevCmd.bat are indeed available in our Visual Studio 2019 installation :

> where /r "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio" *vsdev*
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd\core\vsdevcmd_end.bat
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd\core\vsdevcmd_start.bat

Concretely, in our GitHub projects which depend on Visual Studio (e.g. michelou/cpp-examples), setenv.bat does invoke VsDevCmd.bat (resp. vcvarall.bat for older Visual Studio versions) to setup the Visual Studio tools on the command prompt.

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mics/December 2024 ▲