Simon Says – GNAT Health Check

A small Zig program that finds your local GNAT Ada toolchain, compiles a tiny Ada program, and prints a tribute to Simon J. Wright – the maintainer who kept the macOS GNAT builds alive for many years.

Background

Simon Wright quietly maintained and distributed native macOS GNAT compilers long before the official AdaCore releases caught up. His builds answered questions, fixed obscure bugs, and never asked for attention.

This project is a heartbeat check: it compiles a simple Ada program with your local GNAT and displays the compiler version, target, and build duration – all while acknowledging Simon's contribution.

What it does

• Searches for gnatmake (via login shell, cache, and common paths).
• Extracts compiler version, target triplet, and Ada library path.
• Compiles hello_simon.adb with GNAT and measures the time.
• Prints a thank‑you message together with the build results.

Example output:

With GNAT, Simon Wright gave Ada a home on every Apple machine.
...
GNAT Health Check
-----------------
Compiler  : GNAT 16.1.0
Target    : x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Test unit : hello_simon.adb
Result    : COMPILATION OK
Exit code : 000000000
Duration  : 000001.128s

Ada is alive.
...

Requirements

• Zig 0.16
• A working GNAT installation (e.g., from AdaCore, Homebrew, or Simon's builds)
• macOS, Linux, or any Unix-like system with bash

If you don't have GNAT yet:

• macOS: brew install gcc (GNAT is included) or use the official AdaCore installer.
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install gnat
• Other: grab a build from Simon's repository or AdaCore.

Getting Started

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/0xA672/simon-says.git
cd simon-says

Build and run

# Compile the Zig program (single file, no build system required)
zig build-exe simon-says.zig

# Run the health check
./simon-says

You should see a compilation of the Ada test unit followed by the tribute message and health report.

Optional: make a single binary

If you want to move the binary somewhere else (e.g., /usr/local/bin):

zig build-exe simon-says.zig -O ReleaseSafe
cp simon-says /usr/local/bin/

Then you can run it from anywhere with simon-says.

License

This project is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License, in keeping with Simon Wright's own preference for permissive licensing.

See LICENSE for details.

Acknowledgements

• Simon J. Wright – for years of macOS GNAT builds and community support. See building-gcc-macos-native.
• The Ada community – for keeping a great language alive.