Friday 4 November 2011

Building GCC again

A colleague suggested that I write up building FSF GCC with GNAT for Mac OS X. The notes of an experimental process using GCC 4.6.1 are here; this is somewhat less experimental, and uses the GCC repository.

Friday 28 October 2011

VMware Fusion 4 and Debian

VMware Fusion (the version of VMware for Mac OS X) recently took to nagging me to upgrade to version 4. This is a paid upgrade, but not too steep, so I took the plunge.

Saturday 15 October 2011

Friday 7 October 2011

A little problem with gprbuild

I was configuring AWS (from the git repository), and make setup failed disastrously.

Thursday 8 September 2011

Building GCC

A colleague has suggested that I write up building FSF GCC with GNAT for Mac OS X; these are the notes.

Sunday 21 August 2011

Expressiveness in Python

I've been having fun reworking the Literate Programming tool nuweb in Python; the Mercurial repository for the rework can be browsed here. On the way I've come across a neat hack, and a rather unlikely workaround for Python's lack of a switch statement.

Saturday 6 August 2011

Debugging and stack traces on Mac OS X Lion

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (really, Xcode 4) has changed the way that the system linker works in a way which makes debugging and interpreting stack traces difficult-to-impossible without special action.

Debugging with Mac OS X shared libraries

Writing Ada means you don't need the debugger that often. But when you do need it, you really need it. And often the reason will be an exception, which you'll want to catch and investigate.

Sunday 24 July 2011

When you need gprbuild

Most of the time, if your code is entirely in Ada, it'll build just fine with gnatmake. You only need gprbuild for mixed-language programming.

However, there's one case in which you need gprbuild, even for Ada-only code; it's when you're building a shared library on Mac OS X (Darwin).

Saturday 9 July 2011

Building gprbuild-gpl-2011

The way to build Ada code with GNAT used to be to use gnatmake. This still works, but there's a new kid on the block: gprbuild.

Starting (for 10)

Until now I've relied on posting to comp.lang.ada, with the occasional foray onto the Ada group at identi.ca, and a notebook on TiddlyWiki.

I think now's the time to look into this newfangled blogging thing.