[HN Gopher] Porting the GNAT Ada compiler to macOS/aarch64
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Porting the GNAT Ada compiler to macOS/aarch64
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 92 points
       Date   : 2025-01-13 10:14 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (briancallahan.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (briancallahan.net)
        
       | zmower wrote:
       | Already done here https://github.com/simonjwright/building-gcc-
       | macos-native Simon's the man when it comes to GNAT on macOS.
        
         | kevlar700 wrote:
         | True though from what he has said early on in it being more of
         | a hobby and liking building tools then I am sure he would
         | welcome any help or input.
        
       | zoom6628 wrote:
       | Well that's amazing. And now I can (accidentally of course)
       | install on my M2 work machine.
        
       | Pinus wrote:
       | Only vaguely related, but: Why is everything called a.*64 these
       | days? I keep getting confused between amd64, arm64 and aarch64...
        
         | tjr wrote:
         | Bring on the quadruple-precision floats!
        
         | MarcusE1W wrote:
         | This is often used in relation to the processor architecture.
         | The 64 is added to indicate it's a 64 bit CPU architecture.
         | 
         | This is to distinguish it to the for a long time common 32 bit
         | CPU architectures.
         | 
         | Looking at the current market you could think that there are
         | mostly 64 bit CPUs sold nowadays, but many people still use
         | (older) 32 bit CPUs.
        
         | lloeki wrote:
         | To nitpick there is not quite such a thing as "ARM64", instead
         | there's:
         | 
         | - Aarch64, the execution state
         | 
         | - A64, the instruction set
         | 
         | - ARMvX, the vX of the architecture, both of the above were
         | introduced in ARMv8
         | 
         | ARM64 is kind of a loose umbrella term that might or might not
         | have been officially retconned.
         | 
         | Why is that? Because ARM specifications are modular, so for
         | each vX there are mandatory and optional set of features.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AArch64
        
           | unscaled wrote:
           | There's also no official x64, x86-64 or i686 "architecture",
           | if we want to be pedantic.
           | 
           | There is no official name for the 64-bit instruction set for
           | the x86 architecture, as far as I know. As far as I remember,
           | AMD called this ISA "AMD64" when it was released and Intel
           | just called it "Intel 64". Of course, this term only refers
           | to the basic instruction set. If you see an x86-64 binary, it
           | may be compiled with an extended instruction set like SEE4 or
           | AVX that is not necessarily supported by every x86-64 CPU out
           | there.
           | 
           | Even the umbrella term "x86" for the 32-bit ISA was retconned
           | as far as I know: Intel did not use that term originally.
        
       | jiehong wrote:
       | Alternatively, I see an LLVM front-end for Ada [0], but I'm not a
       | user, so the maturity of such a solution is unclear to me.
       | 
       | [0]: https://blog.adacore.com/combining-gnat-with-llvm
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-01-17 23:02 UTC)