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Installation

An Ada development environment consists basically of a toolchain: an Ada compiler and a build manager. In the case of GNAT, the basic build manager gnatmake comes with the compiler, while a more capable one is the separate GNAT Project Manager gprbuild.

By far the easiest way to get hold of an Ada toolchain is to use the Ada package manager Alire.

Alire​

The Alire website's Releases page provides builds:

Any of these can be installed as described here; follow up with these first steps (this will have the added effect of installing a toolchain for you!)

Toolchain​

Once you have Alire installed, you have a choice of toolchains. You'll normally want to use the latest native toolchain (the one that generates code to run on the machine you're developing on).

alr toolchain --select will present you with a list of choices, something like this:

  1. gnat_native=13.2.1
  2. None
  3. gnat_arm_elf=13.2.1
  4. gnat_avr_elf=13.2.1
  5. gnat_riscv64_elf=13.2.1
  6. gnat_arm_elf=13.1.0
  7. gnat_avr_elf=13.1.0
  8. gnat_native=13.1.0
  9. gnat_riscv64_elf=13.1.0
  0. gnat_arm_elf=12.2.1
  a. (See more choices...)
Enter your choice index (first is default):
>

Press <return> to choose the latest compiler. The selection tool then looks for a matching gprbuild:

Please select the gprbuild version for use with this configuration
  1. gprbuild=22.0.1
  2. None
  3. gprbuild=21.0.2
  4. gprbuild=21.0.1
Enter your choice index (first is default):
>

Again, press <return>. If necessary, Alire will download the selected tools and install them in the Alire environment.