How was newlib supposed to have been used?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 12:09 +0000, Dave Korn wrote:
> On 18 January 2008 06:45, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 23:57 +0000, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 13:43 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Neither, nor and all of it.
> >>> 
> >>> newlib is a libc implementation.
> >> 
> >> Yeah, I'm aware of this :/
> >> 
> >>> I.e. it is a library providing a standardized API to resources
> >>> underneath, which applications might want to use at run-time, and which
> >>> toolchains (compiler/linker etc.) will want to know about.
> >> 
> >> And this too.
> >> 
> >>> What these resources actually are is secondary. They can be
> >>> "bare-metal", a full fledged kernel or other libraries.
> >>> Newlib can be and is being used in all of these situations.
> >> 
> >> Right, so as I'm aiming for bare hw, am I going in the right direction
> >> to get *a minimal GNAT runtime* working for i386-elf (and mips[el]-elf)?
> > 
> > I don't know how to answer this.
> > 
> > GNAT, normally is a toolset implementing a programming language (Ada)
> > built around/ontop of a libc.
> > 
> > Leaving aside all other ugliness of GNAT, I am not sufficiently familiar
> > with Ada to be able to judge how far you can get without at least having
> > some OS-elements (processes, memory-management, io, etc.) available.
> 
>   I have no personal experience with GNAT[*], but a google "gnat newlib"
> suggests that RTEMS, at least, does use or has used newlib to support GNAT on
> target i386-rtemscoff-gnat-newlib among others.
Please note my email address :-)

RTEMS uses newlib as it's libc. For some (few) targets, some people
reported to have been able to build a GNATS enabled GCC ontop of it.

GNATS/RTEMS run-time support is spread into GCC and RTEMS own run-time
libs.

>   You might be able to get
> somewhere by adapting the instructions at 
> 
> http://www.rtems.org/wiki/index.php/RTEMSAda
Well, yes, ... you might ask yourself why this page exist, and why GNAT
is not part of the official RTEMS toolchains ;)

Ralf