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I looked at the AdaCore site, as well as for A# (which now appears to be owned by AdaCore) and neither appear to be free (although I could have misread something). Any recommendations?

Thomas Owens
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GNAT is available for download here: https://libre.adacore.com/

Look for "GNAT GPL Edition". Not sure why it is so well hidden on that little known site.

Mark Biek
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ahab
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    Excellent find. I looked all over the adacore.com site and didn't see that anywhere. – Mark Biek Oct 08 '08 at 12:30
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    It is so well hidden because it is such a good product, and they make their money off of selling the commercial version. Generally the gnu versions are easier to find, so I prefer to use them. – T.E.D. Jan 09 '09 at 17:57
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    The important thing to note about the GNAT GPL version is that it really is GPL, in the sense that you can only use it to compile GPL code - this is due to the licencing of the runtime library and is a pretty good way to ensure that commercial users buy a licence for the full version. This is not a restriction in most other GPL compilers based on GCC. – Kothar Jan 04 '12 at 11:36
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    The version of GNAT that comes with GCC licenses the runtime library under the GPL with an exception so it can be compiled into commercial code; the exception is overall more generous then the LGPL. As the GNATColl library that is also available from the AdaCore site is also under the same GPL+Runtime exception, I'd be surprised if they were changing the license on the GNAT runtime library of the version they offer from their website to be GPL when virtually the same files are available as GPL+Runtime exception from gcc.gnu.org. – prosfilaes Feb 20 '13 at 02:50
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Here's a big list of Ada compilers from Open Directory.

The GNU Ada compiler seems to be a more popular one.

Mark Biek
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GNAT, the GNU Ada implementation: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnat/gnat.html

Serafina Brocious
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In the past the ada front end was not packaged with the gcc compiler, but now the gnat ada compiler is bundled with the gcc compiler when you install most linux distributions. Of course there may be various development libraries that you may need for your own projects, but the ada front end is there. At least that has been my experience with debian and ubuntu over the last couple of years.

As for AdaCore, they hide the libre/free version of the gnat ada compiler because they want to you to buy support; which they can leagally do. However, the gcc compiler is GPL and is considered open source, which means you can use it for free.

msfreesince1994
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Thomas, you can find the GPL edition of GNAT Adacore Ada framework in http://libre.adacore.com/libre/ and download it from http://libre.adacore.com/libre/download/. Just select Free Software or Academic Development and Build Download Package. The compiler is the option gnat-gpl-2011-i686-pc-mingw32-bin.exe, but there are several additional libraries in the list.

Rego
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