Exporting Ada Software to Python and Julia

Abstract

The objective is to demonstrate the making of Ada software available to Python and Julia programmers using GPRbuild. GPRbuild is the project manager of the GNAT toolchain. With GPRbuild the making of shared object files is fully automated and the software can be readily used in Python and Julia. The application is the build process of PHCpack, a free and open source software package to solve polynomial systems by homotopy continuation methods, written mainly in Ada, with components in C ++ , available at github at https://github.com/janverschelde/PHCpack. Language Agnostic ComputingThis paper describes interface development from the perspective of an Ada programmer, aimed to export the functionality of a software package to Python [8] and Julia [1] computational environments, available through Jupyter notebooks [5]. The Jupyter notebook is the interface to SageMath [9], a free open source system for mathematical computing.In order to export all functionality the interface passes through C, which may be regarded as a least common multiple of programming languages, as Ada, Python, and Julia share enough common ground to enable language agnostic computing, as Jupyter stands for Julia, Python, R, and many others.