Note: I know very little about the GCC toolchain, so this question may not make much sense.
Since GCC includes an Ada front end, and it can emit ARM, and devKitPro is based on GCC, is it possible to use Ada instead of C/C++ for writing code on the DS?
Edit: It seems that the target that devKitARM uses is arm-eabi.
devkitPro is not a toolchain, compiler or indeed any software package. The toolchain used to target the DS is devkitARM, one of the toolchains provided by devkitPro.
It may be possible to build the ada compiler but I doubt very much if you'll ever manage to get anything useful running on the DS itself. devkitPro will certainly never provide an ada compiler as part of the packages we produce.
Yes it is possible, see my project https://github.com/Lucretia/tamp and build the cross compiler as per my script. You would then be able to target NDS using Ada. I have build a basic RTS as well which will provide you with local exception handling.
And #Martin Beckett, why do think Ada is aimed squarely at DoD stuff? They dropped the mandate years ago and Ada is easily usable for any project, you do realise that Ada is a general purpose programming language don't you?
(Disclaimer: I don't know Ada)
Possibly.
You might be able to build devKitPro to use Ada, however, the pre-provided binaries (at least for OS X) do not have Ada support compiled in.
However, you will probably find yourself writing tons of C "glue" code to interface with the various hardware registers and the like.
One thing to consider when porting a language to the nintendo DS is the relatively small stack it has (16KB). There are possible workarounds such as swapping the SRAM stack content into DRAM (4MB) when stack gets full or just have the whole stack in DRAM (assumed to be auwfully slow).
And I second Dre on the fact that you'll have to provide yourself glue between the Ada library function you'd like to use and existing libraries on the DS (which are hopefully covering most of the hardware stuff).
On a practical plane, it is not possible.
On a theoretical plane, you could use one custom Ada parser (I found this one on the ANTLR site, but it is quite old) in order to translate Ada to C/C++, and then feed that to devkitpro.
However, the effort of building such translator is probably going to be equal (if not higher) to creating the game itself.
Related
When I'm stepping into debugged program, it says that it can't find crt/crt_c.c file. I have sources of gcc 6.3.0 downloaded, but where is crt_c.c in there?
Also how can I find source code for printf and rand in there? I'd like to step through them in debugger.
Ide is codeblocks, if that's important.
Edit: I'm trying to do so because I'm trying to decrease size of my executable. Going straight into freestanding leaves me with a lot of missing functions, so I intend to study and replace them one by one. I'm trying to do that to make my program a little smaller and faster, and to be able to study assembly output a bit easier.
Also, forgot to mention, I'm on windows, msys2. But answer is still helpful.
How can I find source code for printf and rand in there?
They (printf, rand, etc....) are part of your C standard library which (on Linux) is outside of the GCC compiler. But crt0 is provided by GCC (however, is often not compiled with debug information) and some C files there are generated in the build tree during compilation of GCC.
(on Windows, most of the C standard library is proprietary -inside some DLL provided by MicroSoft- and you are probably forbidden to look into the implementation or to reverse-engineer it; AFAIK EU laws might mention some exception related to interoperability¸ but then you need to consult a lawyer and I am not a lawyer)
Look into GNU glibc (or perhaps musl-libc) if you want to study its source code. libc is generally using system calls (listed in syscalls(2)) provided by the Linux kernel.
I'd like to step through them in debugger.
In practice you won't be able to do that easily, because the libc is provided by your distribution and has generally been compiled without debug information in DWARF format.
Some Linux distributions provide a debuggable variant of libc, perhaps as some libc6-dbg package.
(your question lacks motivation and smells like some XY problem)
I intend to study and replace them one by one.
This is very unrealistic (particularly on Windows, whose system call interface is not well documented) and could take you many years (or perhaps more than a lifetime). Do you have that much time?
Read also Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces and look into OsDev wiki.
I'm trying to do so because I'm trying to decrease size of my executable.
Wrong approach. A debugger needs debug info (e.g. in DWARF) which will increase the size of the executable (but could later be stripped). BTW standard C functions are in some common shared library (or DLL on Windows) which is used by many processes.
I'm on windows, msys2.
Bad choice. Windows is proprietary. Linux is made of free software (more than ten billions lines of source code, if you consider all useful packages inside a typical Linux distribution), whose source code you could study (even if it would take several lifetimes).
I think I finally know what I want in a compiled programming language, a fast compiler. I get the feeling that this is a really superficial thing to care about but some time after switching from Java to Scala for a while I realized that being able to make a small change in code and immediately run the program is actually quite important to me. Besides Java and Go I don't know of any languages that really value compile speed.
Delphi/Object Pascal. Make a change, press F9 and it runs - you don't even notice the compile time. A full rebuild of a fairly substantial project that we run takes of the order of 10-20 seconds, even on a fairly wimpy machine
There's an open source variant available at www.freepascal.org. I've not messed with it but it reportedly is just as fast - it's the design of the Pascal language that allows this.
Java isn't fast for compiling. The feature you a looking for is probably a hot replacement/redeployment while coding. Eclipse recompiles just the files you changed.
You could try some interpreted languages. They usually don't require compiling at all.
I wouldn't choose a language based on compilation speed...
Java is not the fastest compiler out there.
Pascal (and its close relatives) is designed to be fast - it can be compiled in a single pass. Objective Caml is known for its compilation speed (and there is a REPL too).
On the other hand, what you really need is REPL, not a fast recompilation and re-linking of everything. So you may want to try a language which supports an incremental compilation. Clojure fits well (and it is built on top of the same JVM you're used to). Common Lisp is another option.
I'd like to add that there official compilers for languages and unofficial ones made by different people. Obviously because of this the performance changes per compiler.
If you were to talk just about the official compiler I'd say it's probably Fortran. It's very old but it's still used in most science and engineering projects because it is one of the fastest languages. C and C++ come probably tied in second because there also used in science and engineering.
Unfortunately, my C app for PIC32 needs OO too much and I can't continue doing it in C.
Do you know any MIPS32 C++ compiler for PIC32?
Thanks
Microchip's XC32 tool chain now supports C++ since version 1.10
You might contact Comeau Computing; thier C++ compiler generates C code as an intermediate language so that it can then utilise a platform's existing native C compiler where only a C compiler is available, and therefore porting to new platforms is relatively quick and simple.
For various reasons the intermediate generation and compiler adaptation is not accessible to end users so you will still need Comeau to generate a PIC32/C32 port, but it probably won't take long and hopefully they would amortise the cost over sales to other users.
However if you use Commeau or any other C++ to C translator, you will suffer from the inability to use source-level debugging, and that is likley to be the killer to any attempt to use C++ sucessfully without native debugger support.
Although it is not always pretty, your best bet is probably to learn how to implement OO designs in C. Here's a whole book on the subject: http://www.planetpdf.com/codecuts/pdfs/ooc.pdf
According to this fairly recent thread on the microchip forums it looks like C++ support for PIC32 isn't available anywhere yet and isn't a high priority with Microchip. The wisdom of the respondents in that thread appears to be: don't hold your breath.
I'm a MPLAB user myself building small programs so I just take what Microchip gives me. I've never gotten to the point where I thought I needed C++, longed for yes, but never needed. As a next step you can either consider moving to another platform with C++ support or take another look at your design and ask why you need C++ that badly. Some features can be simulated in C with varying amounts of pain and suffering.
You might keep an eye on the proper GCC MIPS port. They have all the pieces, but I don't know if anyone's made C++ work with PIC32 in particular. I know it did work on sgimips.
I'm pretty sure this is possible but I'm not sure how to go about it. I'm very new to building with GCC in general and I have never used FreeRTOS, but I'd like to try getting the OS up and running on a TI ARM Cortex MCU but with a slight twist: I'd like to get it up and running with Pascal. I'm curious:
Is this even possible to get work? If not, the next issues are kind of moot points.
From my Delphi days, I vaguely recall the ability to access functions in C libraries. I'm wondering if I would have access to the C routines in FreeRTOS.
If I use the GCC version (preferable) would I be able to debug using OpenOCD on the target? I'm not quite sure how debug symbols work and if it's more or less language agnostic (hopefully, in this case).
As kind of a bonus question a bit outside the scope of the original query, can I simulate FreeRTOS on an x86 processor (e.g. my development PC) for easier debugging during development? (With a Pascal program, of course..)
I haven't found any documentation on achieving this, so hopefully someone here can shed some light! Any resources would be most helpful. Like I said, I'm very new to this kind of development. I'm also open to suggestions if you think there is a better alternative.
FYI, my preferred host configuration would be something similar to:
Linux (Ubuntu/Debian)
Eclipse IDE for development, unit testing, and hopefully simulation / debugging
OpenOCD for target debugging
GNU Pascal + FreeRTOS on target
FreeRTOS is C source code, so like you say you would have to have some mechanism for linking C with your Pascal programs. Also, FreeRTOS relies on certain registers to be used for things like passing a parameter into a task (as a hypothetical example, the task might always expect the parameter to be in register R0) so you would have to ensure the ABI for the C compiler and the Pascal compiler was the same - or have your task entry in C then have it call a Pascal function (very nasty). Then there is the issue of interrupts, calling inline macros, etc. I would say this would be extremely difficult to achieve.
Both GNU Pascal and Free Pascal support linking to C (gcc) and ARM, as well as calling pascal code from C etc. Writing a header and declaring the prototypes with cdecl is all there is to it.
Macros are a bit bigger problem. Usually I just rewrite them to inline functions (what they should have been anyway). Except for the macro/header issue, the problems are more compiler specific functionality (which you also would have a problem with when porting from one C compiler to the next)
If you prefer TP/Delphi dialect, Free Pascal is the better choice.
I run my old Delphi code fine on my sheevaplug.
There is already an example for FreeRTOS/GCC/OpenOCD on a TI Cortex-M3 (was Luminary Micro Cortex-M3). Be aware though that this is a really old example and both the Eclipse and OpenOCD versions used are out of date.
Although there is an Eclipse project provided, the project is configured as a standard make (as opposed to a managed make) project, so there is a standard makefile that can be just as easily executed from the command line as from within Eclipse.
http://www.freertos.org/portLM3Sxxxx_Eclipse.html
I am a complete newbie to the ARM world. I need to be able to write C code, compile it, and then download into an ARM emulator, and execute. I need to use the GCC 4.1.2 compiler for the C code compilation.
Can anybody point me in the correct directions for the following issues?
What tool chain to use?
What emulator to use?
Are there tutorials or guides on setting up the tool chain?
building a gcc cross compiler yourself is pretty easy. the gcc library and the C library and other things not so much, an embedded library and such a little harder. Depends on how embedded you want to get. I have little use for gcclib or a c library so roll your own works great for me.
After many years of doing this, perhaps it is an age thing, I now just go get the code sourcery tools. the lite version works great. yagarto, devkitarm, winarm or something like that (the site with a zillion examples) all work fine. emdebian also has a good pre-built toolchain. a number of these places if not all have info on how they built their toolchains from gnu sources.
You asked about gcc, but bear in mind that llvm is a strong competitor, and as far as cross compiling goes, since it always cross compiles, it is a far easier cross compiler to download and build and get working than gcc. the recent version is now producing code (for arm) that competes with gcc for performance. gcc is in no way a leader in performance, other compilers I have used run circles around it, but it has been improving with each release (well the 3.x versions sometimes produce better code than the 4.x versions, but you need 4.x for the newer cores and thumb2). even if you go with gcc, try the stable release of llvm from time to time.
qemu is a good emulator, depending on what you are doing the gba emulator virtual gameboy advance is good. There are a couple of nds emulators too. GDB and other places have what appear to be ARMs own armulator. I found it hard to extract and use, so I wrote my own, but being lazy only implemented the thumb instruction set, I called mine the thumbulator. easy to use. Far easier than qemu and armulator to add peripherals to and watch and debug your code. ymmv.
Hmmm I posted a similar answer for someone recently. Google: arm verilog and at umich you will find a file isc.tgz in which is an arm10 behavioural (as in you cannot make a chip from it therefore you can find verilog on the net) model. Which for someone wanting to learn an instruction set, watching your code execute at the gate level is about as good as it gets. Be careful, like a drug, you can get addicted then have a hard time when you go back to silicon where you have relatively zero visibility into your code while it is executing. Somewhere in stackoverflow I posted the steps involved to get that arm10 model and another file or two to turn it into an arm emulator using icarus verilog. gtkwave is a good and free tool for examining the wave (vcd) files.
Above all else you will need the ARM ARM. (The ARM Architectural Reference Manual). Just google it and find it on ARM's web site. There is pseudo code for each instruction teaching you what they do. Use the thumbulator or armulator or others if you need to understand more (mame has an arm core in it too). I make no guarantees that the thumbulator is 100% debugged or accurate, I took some common programs and compared their output to silicon both arm and non-arm to debug the core.
Toolchain you can use Yagarto http://www.yagarto.de/
Emulator you can use Proteus ISIS http://www.labcenter.com/index.cfm
(There is a demo version)
and tutorials, well, google them =)
Good luck!