This blog explores how Rust enables computer vision on a Mars rover, overcoming hardware limits to deliver reliable obstacle detection and autonomous navigation.
Discover Ada through a fun, project-based tutorial! Learn the language’s clarity, safety, and modern features while building an SVG rosetta generator. A fresh, visual way to explore Ada 2022.
As the software landscape grows ever more complex and interconnected, the demand for resilient, high-assurance systems continues to rise, especially within critical national infrastructure and defense. At the recent DARPA Resilient Software Systems Colloquium, a series of panel discussions shed light on how government agencies are not only adopting formal methods but also realizing tangible benefits.
Governments trust memory-safe languages like Ada and Rust — so do we. See why memory safety is essential for secure systems.
In the blog "Let's Write a Safety Monitor for a Mars Rover", I made a big assumption in the procedure that moves that Rover forward; here, I relax that assumption and thus end with a stronger proof of safety for the Rover.
We're happy to announce the fifth edition of our programming awards, The Ada/SPARK Crate of the Year Award! The Alire package manager is a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use this competition to reward the people contributing to the ecosystem.
Originally, constraint solving in Libadalang was handled by several ad-hoc solvers built specifically for different parts of the type system. These implementations were tailored and somewhat fragile. A couple of years ago, a newer approach replaced these with a backend based on satisfiability solvers, AdaSAT. In this blog post, I will use AdaSAT to implement a Sudoku solver.
In this blog, we discover Fuzz Testing and how GNATFuzz can be used as part of AdaCore’s GNAT Dynamic Analysis Suite.
When analyzing a SPARK program with GNATprove, some verification conditions might remain unproven, whether because of a defect in the user’s code, contracts that are too weak, or sometimes because of a tool limitation. In this context, an effective way of helping developers is to provide them with counterexamples, subprogram input values that would lead to invalid executions (out-of-bounds access, division by zero, integer overflow, exceptions, etc.). The project I worked on during my internship was to take advantage of AdaCore's dynamic analysis suite (GNAT DAS) to improve the counter-example technology.
This blog showcases how Rust was used to implement the D*-Lite pathfinding algorithm for an autonomous Mars rover simulation. It highlights Rust’s strengths—such as memory safety, strong typing, and zero-cost abstractions—in building a responsive, efficient navigation system that adapts to dynamic obstacles.
AdaCore Senior Corporate Counsel, Sarah Wallace, explains why partnership and collaboration are integral to her role practicing in-house law in a technology company.
We have taken our Ada Mars Rover demo, featuring a physical robot driven by formally verified SPARK software, to the next level by introducing a simulator that allows you to experience the Rover's capabilities virtually. This simulation, implemented in Rust, accurately models the Rover's movement in an obstacle-filled environment, all while being controlled by the original SPARK code. This project exemplifies the synergy between Ada and Rust, demonstrating how these technologies can be effectively combined to build reliable, safety-critical applications.
AdaCore and Lynx Software Technologies have reaffirmed their longstanding technology partnership to support avionics and defense customers developing safety-critical applications with Ada. Both companies will showcase their software solutions at the Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit (“QuadA”) conference and exposition in Nashville, Tennessee, May 14-16. AdaCore and Lynx solutions are used in hundreds of military and aerospace programs worldwide.
This article unpacks what it means to be Secure by Design, outlining practical measures for integrating security into the software lifecycle. It highlights the critical role of formal methods, particularly the SPARK technology, in delivering on this vision.
What makes our software so vulnerable?The majority of today’s technical systems are largely composed of software. As such, the reliability and security of these systems depend heavily on the reliability and security of their software components. And this is precisely where a major problem lies: increasing connectivity and a large number of known vulnerabilities in commonly used software make our systems highly susceptible to attack.
Over the past few years, we've been progressively developing new GNAT extensions for the Ada programming language, which you can follow and contribute to on the github RFC page. While the implementation is ramping up, we can already share a few aspects of the language that can be tested with recent versions of the GNAT Pro compiler, which will eventually find their way to the open-source version.Let's play a game. The code below is an - arguably over-engineered - version of a tic-tac-toe game. Can you find the 7 differences (or features) introduced by the Ada extensions? Note that some of these are only visible on one line, some have an impact across the entire application.If you want to compile this code, you will need both a GNAT Pro wavefront with the latest changes in, and the switch -gnatX0 that enables all experimental features
Over the course of the last few years and as part of the 'Edge Avionics' project, funded by the Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) of the UK Royal Air Force (UK RAF), AdaCore has been developing toolchain solutions for Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) microprocessor architectures. In addition, AdaCore evaluated security claims made by the CHERI community through the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) initiative. The goal was to inform Edge Avionics project partners about the level of security assurance offered by the Arm Morello microprocessor; a modified Arm Neoverse N1 supporting the Armv8-A architecture and conforming to the CHERI compartmentalization specification. The DSbD project is now in the final stages, the overarching goal of mass adoption of CHERI-architectures is now looked after by the CHERI Alliance.
The March edition of the TIOBE Index shows Ada in the top 20, hitting position 18. This shows a renewed interest in Ada, perhaps due to the increased interest in memory-safe languages and software safety and correctness in general.
The Ada Mars Rover shouldn’t crash into obstacles. See how we formalized this property, discovered an unstated assumption in our remote-control mode that could have led the Rover to crash, removed the assumption, and ultimately proved this property using SPARK. You’ll be surprised how little new code - including proof code - was needed!
A new Learn course is now available, focusing on how to use the Ada language to express common idioms, both language-dependent and -independent.
