| Abstract: | A technique for implementing Ada with reasonable effort on a piece of non-standard hardware is described. The target machine is a single processing element in an experimental multiprocessor based on NS32000. A portable Ada front-end compiler was used for retargeting, and the process of acquiring and evaluating the front end is described. Based on this experience, comments on the validation, quality and efficiency of Ada compilers are given, along with a detailed overview of the resultant system. The Ada system was built from scratch on the bare hardware. It has three main components: a code generator, a run-time system and an Ada kernel. The code generator is table driven and generates symbolic NS32000 assembler. This code is then assembled and linked by commercially available components. The run-time system and the kernel are implemented in assembly language and Concurrent Euclid and handle tasking, exceptions and scheduling. The result is a complete Ada implementation. |
