Relocating GCC

AdaCore's doinstall is an excellent way of installing the compiler where you want to. Unfortunately, GCC 4.9 uses the shared libgcc_s.1.dylib, which has no @rpath-type constructs, and so the compiler executables expect to find libgcc_s.1.dylib in the place it was built for. (Not to mention libstdc++.6.dylib.)

Building GNAT GPL 2014 for arm-eabi

These notes describe building GNAT GPL 2014 for the Cortex M4 on Mac OS X.

My target board was the STM32M4F29I Discovery.

Emacs vs distnoted

I’ve been having trouble for a while with Emacs 24.3 and OS X Mavericks; the housekeeping daemon distnoted expands without limit until everything slows to a crawl, and the only cure I know is to quit Emacs and restart.

Turns out there’s a patch available to fix this (that link includes a link to a prebuilt binary, if you’re feeling lazy!)

C libraries and the runpath

This was prompted by a posting on comp.lang.ada; under Mac OS X, if you write a binding to a C library that's in a non-standard place, it's tricky to link against the binding so that the C library is found at run time.