LLVM with Ada support

Our objective is to remove array bound checks. So we need a strongly typed language that will have array bound checks to remove all possible. Ada is an imperative language that is strongly typed.

This week I have been busy working out how to use LLVM to compile Ada. It was a little difficult on the beginning because I had to install an old version of the Ada compiler (GNAT), and I didn't realize it a first. But after that it went a little smother. I asked on the llvm-dev list for some help, and Duncan Sands helped me out. Below is a description of what I had to do to install llvm-gcc with support for Ada.

• The build requires having a compiler that supports Ada, C and C++. The Ada front-end is written in Ada so an Ada compiler is needed to build it. Compilers known to work with the LLVM 2.4 release are gcc-4.2 and the 2005, 2006 and 2007 versions of the GNAT GPL Edition.

• So first thing is to do is download GNAT 2007. Download it from here.

• Export the download in a folder. Lets call it ada_folder. Then install it into /build.

• Now we need to get llvm-gcc. Lest call llvm-gcc_folder the folder where llvm-gcc is downloaded.

svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm-gcc-4.2/trunk llvm-gcc_folder

• Make a build directory for llvm-gcc and make it the current directory:

cd
mkdir build
cd build

• Now we need to configure it.

export CC=/build/bin/gcc
export CXX=PATH_TO_C++_COMPILER

../configure --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,ada --disable-bootstrap --disable-nls --disable-multilib --enable-checking --program-prefix=llvm- --prefix=/build --enable-llvm=

• Before we build the compiler we need to put gnat2007 in our classpath. Only while we build it, we can change it later.

export PATH=/build/bin:$PATH

• Build and install the compiler:

make -j2
make install

• Now we need to change the PATH:

export PATH=/build/bin:/build/libexec/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.2.1:$PATH