pouetpouet-board VS programming-with-ada

Still working on my mechanical keyboard firmware. It's nearly working correctly with layer support. Still need to debug some minor glitches.

Finally got to work again on my Ada firmware (after being on-and-off for several months) for my custom built mechanical keyboard, I've finally reached a state where I can focus on features more than debugging low-level USB issues (first time looking deep into USB and got to write the driver for stm32f072).

I'm writing a firmware in pure Ada for my custom keyboard (https://github.com/dkm/pouetpouet-board). First step is to port existing HAL-implem/Drivers from Ada_Driver_Library to stm32f0, which is already in looking good: GPIO, UART and USB (enumeration is working, that's a good step) are in good shape. Then I'll probably have to read a bit more how other keyboard firmware are really working under the hood.

I wrote up a bunch of stuff about it

I am writing an article for Programming with Ada showing how to send an IMCP using just the Ada standard library and writing your own bindings to C. This is a port of program I wrote in C++.

I have one already for my own Ada notes, but it doesn't autogenerate. Sphinx allows arbitrarily complex tables, while also providing the ability to generate the documentation and keep it locally, which would be important for people on isolated/proprietary/military networks. It would be interesting to have a site generated by a crate in Alire, so you could download and run it locally as needed.

There's also: - http://learn.adacore.com - https://pyjarrett.github.io/programming-with-ada/ - https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming - The video's not available yet, but this might be useful: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/ada_outsiders_guide/

I also did a few things: - Wrote an online e-book about Ada - Septum - context-based source code search for multi-million line codebases (I use this nearly every day at work. It's being submitted as my Ada crate of the year. - dir_iterators - library similar to the incredible walkdir. - project_indicators - library for spinners and progress bars. - trendy_terminal - library for cross-platform terminal setup, VT100 support, and GNU readline-like behavior. - trendy_test - library for simple unit testing, which runs tests in parallel. - Ada Ray Tracer - an Ada port of Ray Tracing in One Weekend. - dirs_to_graphviz - Make graphviz files from directory trees. - rst_tables - a tool to draw RST table outlines.

> say, Ada programmers.

I stand summoned.

> Unfortunately, none of them ever seem to show up.

We do from time to time, but people assume our language is dead (it isn't). I learned it last year and I've been very impressed by how simple it is, given the speed you get with it.

It was a "big language" at the time, but now it's a language smaller than Rust or C++ which offers good performance with straightforward syntax.

Ada has inline assembly, easy usage of compiler intrinsics, dead-simple binding to C, built-in multi-tasking (which includes CPU pinning), a good standard library, RAII, and real honest-to-goodness built-in, not-null-terminated strings. It's a compiled language, so you get good speed in general, but the built-in concurrency really does help work which can be split up. Ada 202x is getting even finer grained parallelism (parallel for-loops) in the language itself to even further help this.

- https://learn.adacore.com/

- https://github.com/pyjarrett/programming-with-ada

- https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming