Post #3579843
2026-07-04 12:30 UTC
@techokami@woof.tech Has the bootstrapping and licensing situation improved recently?
A few years ago, I tried to build an Ada codebase and needed a compiler. At the time, you had to be careful not to use AdaCore's GNAT-GPL because of the license restrictions, and more or less the only unrestricted GNAT builds were in Linux distro package repos. And since building GNAT requires an existing Ada compiler, other platforms were kind of screwed, unless you want to manually cross-bootstrap from Debian... :(
Replies (1)
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@techokami@woof.tech 2026-07-04 12:37
@dgelessus@mastodon.social Wait what do you mean by license restrictions on the compiler? O_o [does some quick research] Okay so, I was only aware of the GNAT that is part of the GNU Compiler Collection, and today I learned about AdaCore's version. Yeah it seems the AdaCore version is a bit... messier? But they did do something about it: https://www.adacore.com/blog/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source-community