AdaCore Releases GNAT Pro 7.3, QGen 1.0 and GNATdashboard 1.0
by Olivier Ramonat –
February saw the annual customer release of a number of important products. This is no mean task when you consider the fact that GNAT Pro is available on over 50 platforms and supports over 150 runtime profiles (ranging from Full Ada Support to the very restricted Zero Footprint Profile suitable for safety-critical development). All in all, from the branching of the preview version to the customer release it takes us nearly 4 months to package everything up! Quality is assured through the internally developed AdaCore Factory.
Below are the details of the enhancements, many of which come directly from customer input:
GNAT Pro 7.3.1
GNAT Pro 7.3.1 has upgraded the backend (GCC 4.9) and debugging technologies (GDB 7.8) and incorporates over 175 new features. These include improved diagnostic messages and warning configuration, extended support for non default endianness, a math library on bare board platforms, support for large files on 32bits systems, improved support for inlining, overflow checks enabled by default, enhanced code generation and debugging capabilities.
In addition, most GNAT Pro tools now support aggregate projects. Parallel and incremental processing has been also added to many tools (e.g. gnat2xml, gnatmetric, ...), and support for stubbing units has been added in GNATtest.
CodePeer 3.0.1
- DO-178B and EN50128 qualification,
- support for IEEE 754 floating point semantics,
- enhanced project file support,
- improved support for other compilers,
- new and enhanced messages.
SPARK 15.0.1
- language features: support for tagged types and dynamic dispatching, support for proof-only ("ghost") code,
- proof capabilities: new automatic generation of contracts, parallel proofs, better handling of arrays, integers and floating point proofs, support for manual provers,
- improved handling and categorization of messages and assumptions.
GPS 6.1.1 & GNATbench 2.9.1
- improved source navigation (engine using a database),
- simplified workflow and project templates for bare board platforms,
- better Ada 2012 and SPARK 2014 support,
- support for Eclipse 4.4 Luna and Workbench 4.0.
This year's release also saw 2 new products launched:
QGen 1.0.1
QGen is a qualifiable and customizable code generator producing Ada (SPARK-compliant) and C (MISRA C-compliant) from Simulink and Stateflow models. It is particularly suited for usage in regulated industries by organizations who develop high-integrity real-time applications with Simulink/Stateflow and who want to decrease their V&V costs on generated source code.
GNATdashboard 1.0.1
A visual tool that supports quality assurance activities, integrating and aggregating the results of AdaCore's static and dynamic analysis tools within a common interface.