The GNAT project started in 1992 when the
United States Air Force awarded
New York University (NYU) a contract to build a
free compiler for Ada to help with the Ada 9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract required the use of the
GNU GPL for all development, and assigned the copyright to the
Free Software Foundation. The first official validation of GNAT occurred in 1995. In 1994 and 1996, the original authors of GNAT
Robert Dewar and Edmond Schonberg founded two sister companies,
Ada Core Technologies in New York City and ACT-Europe (later AdaCore SAS) in Paris, to provide continuing development and commercial support of GNAT. The two companies always operated as one entity, but did not formally unify until 2012 as AdaCore. GNAT was initially released separately from the main GCC sources. On October 2, 2001, the GNAT sources were contributed to the GCC
CVS repository. The last version to be released separately was GNAT 3.15p, based on GCC 2.8.1, on October 2, 2002. Starting with GCC 3.4, on major platforms the official GCC release is able to pass 100% of the
ACATS Ada tests included in the GCC testsuite. By GCC 4.0, more exotic platforms were also able to pass 100% of the ACATS tests. == License ==