23 Generating Ada Bindings for C and C++ headers

GNAT now comes with a binding generator for C and C++ headers which is intended to do 95% of the tedious work of generating Ada specs from C or C++ header files.

Note that this capability is not intended to generate 100% correct Ada specs, and will is some cases require manual adjustments, although it can often be used out of the box in practice.

Some of the known limitations include:

• only very simple character constant macros are translated into Ada constants. Function macros (macros with arguments) are partially translated as comments, to be completed manually if needed.
• some extensions (e.g. vector types) are not supported
• pointers to pointers or complex structures are mapped to System.Address
• identifiers with identical name (except casing) will generate compilation errors (e.g. shm_get vs SHM_GET).

The code generated is using the Ada 2005 syntax, which makes it easier to interface with other languages than previous versions of Ada.

• Running the binding generator
• Generating bindings for C++ headers
• Switches