by Ghjuvan Lacambre –
Time travel debugging in GNAT Studio with GDB and RR
Learn how to use GDB and RR's advanced time traveling features in GNAT Studio.
by Maxim Reznik –
Android application with Ada and WebAssembly
Having previously shown how to create a Web application in Ada, it's not so difficult to create an Android application in Ada. Perhaps the simplest way is to install Android Studio. Then just create a new project and choose "Empty Activity". Open the layout, delete TextView and put WebView instead.
by Pat Rogers –
Making An RC Car with Ada and SPARK
As a demonstration for the use of Ada and SPARK in very small embedded targets, I created a remote-controlled (RC) car using Lego NXT Mindstorms motors and sensors but without using the Lego computer or Lego software. I used an ARM Cortex System-on-Chip board for the computer, and all the code -- the control program, the device drivers, everything -- is written in Ada. Over time, I’ve upgraded some of the code to be in SPARK. This blog post describes the hardware, the software, the SPARK upgrades, and the repositories that are used and created for this purpose.
by Pierre-Marie de Rodat –
A Further Expedition into Libadalang: Save Time with Libadalang.Helpers.App
Martyn’s recent blog post showed small programs based on Libadalang to find uses of access types in Ada sources. Albeit short, these programs need to take care of all the tedious logistics around processing Ada sources: find the files to work on, create a Libadalang analysis context, use it to read the source files, etc. Besides, they are not very convenient to run:
by Vadim Godunko –
Using GNAT-LLVM to target Ada to WebAssembly
The GNAT-LLVM project provides an opportunity to port Ada to new platforms, one of which is WebAssembly. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the porting of Ada and the development of bindings to use Web API provided by the browser directly from Ada applications.
by Fabien Chouteau –
AdaCore at FOSDEM 2020
Like last year and the year before, AdaCore will participate to the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. It is always a key event for the Ada/SPARK community and we are looking forward to meet Ada enthusiasts. You can check the program of the Ada/SPARK devroom here.
by Fabien Chouteau –
Ada on a Feather
I was quite happy to see AdaFruit release their first Feather format board including a micro-controller with plenty of Ada support, the STM32F4. I bought a board right away and implemented some support code for it.
by Quentin Ochem –
Witnessing the Emergence of a New Ada Era
For nearly four decades the Ada language (in all versions of the standard) has been helping developers meet the most stringent reliability, safety and security requirements in the embedded market. As such, Ada has become an entrenched player in its historic A&D niche, where its technical advantages are recognized and well understood. Ada has also seen usage in other domains (such as medical and transportation) but its penetration has progressed at a somewhat slower pace. In these other markets Ada stands in particular contrast with the C language, which, although suffering from extremely well known and documented flaws, remains a strong and seldom questioned default choice. Or at least, when it’s not the choice, C is still the starting point (a gateway drug?) for alternatives such as C++ or Java, which in the end still lack the software engineering benefits that Ada embodies..
by Paul Butcher –
AdaCore for HICLASS - Enabling the Development of Complex and Secure Aerospace Systems
What's changed? In 2019 AdaCore created a UK business unit and embarked on a new and collaborative venture researching and developing advanced UK aerospace systems. This blog introduces the reader to ‘HICLASS’, describes our involvement and explains how participation in this project is aligned with AdaCore’s core values.
by Martyn Pike –
An Expedition into Libadalang
I’ve been telling Ada developers for a while now that Libadalang will open up the possibility of more-easily writing Ada source code analysis tools. (You can read more about Libadalang here and here and can also access the project on Github.)
by Alexander Senier –
RecordFlux: From Message Specifications to SPARK Code
Handling binary data is hard. Errors in parsers routinely lead to critical security vulnerabilities. In this post we show how the RecordFlux toolset eases the creation of formally verified binary parsers in SPARK.
by Arnaud Charlet –
The Power of Technology Integration and Open Source
Part of our core expertise at AdaCore is to integrate multiple technologies as smoothly as possible and make it a product. This started at the very beginning of our company by integrating a code generator (GCC) with an Ada front-end (GNAT) which was then followed by integrating a debugger engine (GDB) and led to today's rich GNAT Pro offering.
by Michael Frank –
Learning SPARK via Conway's Game of Life
How I learned to write SPARK-provable code using Conway's Game Of Life
by Claire Dross –
Pointer Based Data-Structures in SPARK
As seen in a previous post, it is possible to use pointers (or access types) in SPARK provided the program abides by a strict memory ownership policy designed to prevent aliasing. We will show in this post how to define pointer-based data-structures in SPARK and how to traverse them without breaking the ownership policy.
by Arnaud Charlet –
Combining GNAT with LLVM
Presenting the GNAT LLVM project At AdaCore labs, we have been working for some time now on combining the GNAT Ada front-end with a different code generator than GCC.
by Emma Adby –
The Make with Ada competition is back!
AdaCore’s fourth annual Make with Ada competition launched this week with over $8K in cash and prizes to be awarded for the most innovative embedded systems projects developed using Ada and/or SPARK.
by Maxim Reznik, Yannick Moy –
First Ada Virtual Conference organized by and for the Ada community
The Ada Community has gathered recently around a new exciting initiative - an Ada Virtual Conference, to present Ada-related topics in a 100% remote event. The first such conference took place on August, 10th 2019, around the topic of the new features in Ada 202x. Here is what was presented.
by Isabelle Vialard –
Secure Use of Cryptographic Libraries: SPARK Binding for Libsodium
The challenge faced by cryptography APIs is to make building functional and secure programs easy for the user. In this blog post I will present you how I created a SPARK binding for Libsodium, using strong typing and preconditions/postconditions to enforce a safe and functional use of basic cryptographic primitives.
by Joffrey Huguet, Johannes Kanig –
Proving a simple program doing I/O ... with SPARK
The functionality of many security-critical programs is directly related to Input/Output (I/O). This includes command-line utilities such as gzip, which might process untrusted data downloaded from the internet, but also any servers that are directly connected to the internet, such as webservers, DNS servers and so on. In this blog post we show an approach that deals with error handling and reasoning about content, and demonstrate the approach using the cat command line utility.
by Juan Zamorano –
Using Ada for a Spanish Satellite Project
I am an Associate Professor at Polytechnic University of Madrid’s (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid / UPM) in the Department of Architecture and Technology of Computer Systems. For the past several years I have been directing a team of colleagues and students in the development of a UPMSat-2 microsatellite. The project originally started in 2013 as a follow-to the UPM-SAT 1, launched by an Ariane-4 in 1995.
by Yannick Moy, Raphaël Amiard, Tucker Taft –
RFCs for Ada and SPARK evolution now on GitHub
Interested in participating in the evolution of the Ada or SPARK languages? We have something for you.
by Claire Dross –
Using Pointers in SPARK
In this blog post, I will present one of the most interesting additions to the community 2019 version of SPARK: pointer support. One of the core assumption in SPARK has always been the absence of aliasing, so adding pointers without breaking this assumption was quite a challenge. I will explain how this was achieved using an ownership model for pointers (like is done in Rust) through small examples.
by Nicolas Setton –
GNAT Community 2019 is here!
We are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2019 has been released! See https://www.adacore.com/download.
by Boran Car –
Bringing Ada To MultiZone
C is the dominant language of the embedded world, almost to the point of exclusivity. Due to its age, and its goal of being a “portable assembler”, it deliberately lacks type-safety, opening up exploit vectors. Proposed solutions are partitioning the application into smaller intercommunicating blocks, designed with the principle of least privilege in mind; and rewriting the application in a type-safe language. We believe that both approaches are complementary and want to show you how to combine separation and isolation provided by MultiZone together with iteratively rewriting parts in Ada. We will take the MultiZone SDK demo and rewrite one of the zones in Ada.
by Allan Ascanius, Per Dalgas Jakobsen –
Winning DTU RoboCup with Ada and SPARK
The Danish Technical University has a yearly RoboCup where autonomous vehicles solve a number of challenges. We participated with RoadRunner, a 3D printed robot with wheel suspension, based on the BeagleBone Blue ARM-based board and the Pixy 1 camera with custom firmware enabling real-time line detection. Code is written in Ada and formally proved correct with SPARK at Silver level.
by Joffrey Huguet –
Using SPARK to prove 255-bit Integer Arithmetic from Curve25519
In 2014, Adam Langley, a well-known cryptographer from Google, wrote a post on his personal blog, in which he tried to prove functions from curve25519-donna, one of his projects, using various verification tools: SPARK, Frama-C, Isabelle... He describes this attempt as "disappointing", because he could not manage to prove "simple" things, like absence of runtime errors. I will show in this blogpost that today, it is possible to prove what he wanted to prove, and even more.
by Pamela Trevino –
Public Ada Training Paris June 3-7, 2019
This course is geared to software professionals looking for a practical introduction to the Ada language with a focus on embedded systems, including real-time features as well as critical features introduced in Ada 2012. By attending this course you will understand and know how to use Ada for both sequential and concurrent applications, through a combination of live lectures from AdaCore's expert instructors and hands-on workshops using AdaCore's latest GNAT technology. AdaCore will provide an Ada 2012 tool-chain and ARM-based target boards for embedded workshops. No previous experience with Ada is required.
by Arnaud Charlet –
How Do We Use CodePeer at AdaCore
A question that our users sometimes ask us is "do you use CodePeer at AdaCore and if so, how?". The answer is yes! and this blog post will hopefully give you some insights into how we are doing it for our own needs.
by Peter Chapin –
Ten Years of Using SPARK to Build CubeSat Nano Satellites With Students
My colleague, Carl Brandon, and I have been running the CubeSat Laboratory at Vermont Technical College (VTC) for over ten years. During that time we have worked with nearly two dozen students on building and programming CubeSat nano satellites. Because of their general inexperience, and because of the high student turnover rate that is natural in an educational setting, our development process is often far from ideal. Here SPARK has been extremely valuable to us. What we lack in rigor of the development process we make up for in the rigor of the SPARK language and tools. In November 2013 we launched a low Earth orbiting CubeSat. The launch vehicle contained 13 other university built CubeSats. Most were never heard from. One worked for a few months. Ours worked for two years until it reentered Earth's atmosphere as planned in November 2015.
by Yannick Moy, Nicolas Setton, Ben Brosgol –
A Readable Introduction to Both MISRA C and SPARK Ada
MISRA C is the most widely known coding standard restricting the use of the C programming language for critical software. For good reasons. For one, its focus is entirely on avoiding error-prone programming features of the C programming language rather than on enforcing a particular programming style. In addition, a large majority of rules it defines are checkable automatically (116 rules out of the total 159 guidelines), and many tools are available to enforce those. As a coding standard, MISRA C even goes out of its way to define a consistent sub-language of C, with its own typing rules (called the "essential type model" in MISRA C) to make up for the lack of strong typing in C.
by Yannick Moy, Nicolas Roche, Pierre-Marie de Rodat, Fabien Chouteau –
AdaCore at FOSDEM 2019
Like last year, we've sent a squad of AdaCore engineers to participate in the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. Like last year, we had great interactions with the rest of the Ada and SPARK Community in the Ada devroom on Saturday. That's what we have to say about it.
by Rob Tice –
AdaFractal Part 2: Fixed Point and Floating Point Math Performance and Parallelization
In Part 1 of this blog post I discussed why I chose to implement this application using the Ada Web Server to serve the computed fractal to a web browser. In this part I will discuss a bit more about the backend of the application, the Ada part.
by Rob Tice –
AdaFractal Part1: Ada with a Portable GUI
The is the first part of a multiple part post that covers the development of the AdaFractal project. The idea was to create fractals in Ada. Here we will cover how to use AWS to create a flexible and portable way to display the generated fractals without using bulky graphics libraries.
by Quentin Ochem –
NVIDIA is joining the Ada and SPARK adopter wave
Over the past several years, a great number of public announcements have been made about companies that are either studying or adopting the Ada and SPARK programming languages. Noteworthy examples include Dolby, Denso, LASP and Real Heart, as well as the French Security Agency.
by Quentin Ochem –
Proving Memory Operations - A SPARK Journey
The promise behind the SPARK language is the ability to formally demonstrate properties in your code regardless of the input values that are supplied - as long as those values satisfy specified constraints. As such, this is quite different from static analysis tools such as our CodePeer or the typical offering available for e.g. the C language, which trade completeness for efficiency in the name of pragmatism. Indeed, the problem they’re trying to solve - finding bugs in existing applications - makes it impossible to be complete. Or, if completeness is achieved, then it is at the cost of massive amount of uncertainties (“false alarms”). SPARK takes a different approach. It requires the programmer to stay within the boundaries of a (relatively large) Ada language subset and to annotate the source code with additional information - at the benefit of being able to be complete (or sound) in the verification of certain properties, and without inundating the programmer with false alarms.
by Yannick Moy –
Amazon Relies on Formal Methods for the Security of AWS
Byron Cook, who founded and leads the Automated Reasoning Group at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security, gave a powerful talk at the Federated Logic Conference in July about how Amazon uses formal methods for ensuring the security of parts of AWS infrastructure. In the past four years, this group of 20+ has progressively hired well-known formal methods experts to face the growing demand inside AWS to develop tools based on formal verification for reasoning about cloud security. What is unique so far is the level of investment at AWS in formal verification as a means to radically eliminate some security problems, both for them and for their customers. This is certainly an approach we're eager to support with our own investment in the SPARK technology.
by Emma Adby –
It's time to Make with Ada!
The challenge Are you ready to develop a project to the highest levels of safety, security and reliability? If so, Make with Ada is the challenge for you! We’re calling on embedded developers across the globe to build cool embedded applications using the Ada and SPARK programming languages and are offering over $8000 in total prizes. In addition, eligible students will compete for a reward of an Analog Discovery 2 Pro Bundle worth $299.99!
by Pamela Trevino –
Public Ada Training Paris, France Dec 3 - 7, 2018
This course is geared to software professionals looking for a practical introduction to the Ada language with a focus on embedded systems, including real-time features as well as critical features introduced in Ada 2012. By attending this course you will understand and know how to use Ada for both sequential and concurrent applications, through a combination of live lectures from AdaCore's expert instructors and hands-on workshops using AdaCore's latest GNAT technology. AdaCore will provide an Ada 2012 tool-chain and ARM-based target boards for embedded workshops. No previous experience with Ada is required.
by Julia Teissl –
Train control using Ada on a Raspberry Pi
I was looking for a topic for my master thesis in embedded systems engineering when one of my advisor proposed the idea of programming a control system for autonomous trains in Ada. Since I am fascinated by the idea of autonomous vehicles I agreed immediately without knowing Ada.
by Fabien Chouteau –
Ada on FPGAs with PicoRV32
When I bought the TinyFPGA-BX board, I thought it would be an opportunity to play a little bit with FPGA, learn some Verilog or VHDL. But when I discovered that it was possible to have a RISC-V CPU on it, I knew I had to run Ada code on it.
by Pamela Trevino –
AdaCore major sponsor at HIS 2018
We are happy to announce that, AdaCore, alongside Altran and Jaguar Land Rover will be major sponsors of the fifth edition of the renowned High Integrity Software Conference on the 6th November in Bristol!
by Fabien Chouteau, Emma Adby, Yannick Moy –
Learn.adacore.com is here
We are very proud to announce the availability of our new Ada and SPARK learning platform learn.adacore.com, which will replace AdaCoreU(niversity) e-learning platform. Learn all about it in this blog post.
by Emma Adby, Fabien Chouteau –
GNAT Community 2018 is here!
Calling all members of the Ada and SPARK community, we are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2018 is here! adacore.com/download
by Yannick Moy –
Security Agency Uses SPARK for Secure USB Key
ANSSI, the French national security agency, has published the results of their work since 2014 on designing and implementing an open-hardware & open-source USB key that provides defense-in-depth against vulnerabilities on the USB hardware, architecture, protocol and software stack. In this project called WooKey, Ada and SPARK are key components for the security of the platform. This is a very compelling demontration of both the usability and the power of safe languages and formal verification to develop secure systems.
by Yannick Moy, Roderick Chapman –
How Ada and SPARK Can Increase the Security of Your Software
There is a long-standing debate about which phase in the Software Development Life Cycle causes the most bugs: is it the specification phase or the coding phase? A recent study by NIST shows that, in the software industry at large, coding bugs are causing the majority of security issues. Choosing a safer language like Ada or SPARK is a critical component for reducing these vulnerabilities that result from simple mistakes. In a new freely available booklet, we explain how these languages and the associated toolsets can be used to increase the security of software.
by Johannes Kanig –
Taking on a Challenge in SPARK
Last week, the programmer Hillel posted a challenge (the link points to a partial postmortem of the provided solutions) on Twitter for someone to prove a correct implementation of three small programming problems: Leftpad, Unique, and Fulcrum.
by Thomas Quinot –
PolyORB now lives on Github
PolyORB, AdaCore's versatile distribution middleware, now lives on Github. Its new home is https://github.com/AdaCore/polyorb
by Rob Tice –
SPARKZumo Part 2: Integrating the Arduino Build Environment Into GPS
This is part #2 of the SPARKZumo series of blog posts. This post covers the build system that was used to build the SPARKZumo project and how to automate the process in GPS.
by Fabien Chouteau, Yannick Moy, Vasiliy Fofanov, Nicolas Setton –
A Modern Syntax for Ada
One of the most criticized aspect of the Ada language throughout the years has been its outdated syntax. Fortunately, AdaCore decided to tackle this issue by implementing a new, modern, syntax for Ada.
by Fabien Chouteau –
Getting Rid of Rust with Ada
There are a lot of DIY CNC projects out there (router, laser, 3D printer, egg drawing, etc.), but I never saw a DIY CNC sandblaster. So I decided to make my own.