As AdaCore celebrates the start of a new year in business, we reflect on 2024, a year of development and future-proofing combined with consolidating our position as the trusted experts in high-integrity software tools.

We started 2024 with the news that Battery Ventures, a global, technology-focused investment firm, made a significant investment in AdaCore. This strategic partnership will catalyze AdaCore's expansion over the coming years.

Our 30th-year celebrations led us to reflect on the beginnings of our company. We are proud of our association with Ada and its Ada 95 pioneers. Ada's precision programming, which combines specifications, typing, and coding, remains at the core of our approach. In the last decade, we have extended precision programming with automated verification in SPARK/Ada. Unsurprisingly, as we expand our palette of supported languages, we have embraced Rust alongside Ada, SPARK, and C/C++ languages.

Featured Projects

Edge Avionics for a Safer Future

AdaCore's GNAT Pro for CHERI technology has emerged from phase 1 of the collaborative and ongoing Edge Avionics program. Edge Avionics aims to research state-of-the-art systems security by building a real-world demonstrator avionics defense platform that showcases cyber and battlefield resilience.

The Edge Avionics program is funded by the Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) of the UK Royal Air Force (UK RAF). Edge Avionics is a consortium led on behalf of the RCO by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl, an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD)) and delivered by GE Aerospace (the prime), Wind River, and AdaCore.

Edge Avionics's primary mission is to evaluate security claims made by the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) initiative within a large-scale defense application.

DSbD is a program supported by the UK government to transform digital technology and create a more resilient and secure foundation for a safer future. DSbD involves a significant collaboration between academia, industry, and government with an essential emphasis on evaluating the security benefits of Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI). In partnership with The University of Cambridge and Arm, the initial CHERI initiative has also received funding from the US government through SRI International via the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense (DOD)).

AdaCore Participates in SCHEME (Safety-Critical Harsh Environment Micro-processing Evolution)

We were pleased to announce our participation in the SCHEME research project. Rolls-Royce has assembled a world-class consortium of UK industry and academia to deliver the next generation of high-integrity processing platforms for use in aerospace and other harsh environments.

SCHEME will develop a new generation of safety-critical and cyber-secure microprocessors. The microprocessor and support infrastructure will be engineered from the bottom up to provide a long-term, cost-effective, high-integrity processing solution. The bespoke processor will reduce design and through-life costs, ensure the security of supply, and protect the semiconductor industry from the global issues that face it.

SCHEME will provide the UK with a highly capable microprocessing platform that can be deployed in aerospace and adjacent sectors where safety criticality and cyber security are of the utmost importance. This includes emerging sectors that are key to the future of the UK economy, such as autonomous vehicles and small modular nuclear reactors. Furthermore, the consortium has the potential to provide a complete packaged solution for high-integrity systems development to many potential customers, both within and outside the UK.

25.0 Product Release

Our early 2025 product release, marked 25.0, is available for feedback and early integration. The first stable version will be released in Q1 2025 and marked 25.1, followed by a bugfix release in the summer marked 25.2. Highlights of this release include our yearly GCC upgrade, which is now on version 13, more LLVM-based compilers, new SPARK-compatibles libraries, better support for selective instrumentation and coverage analysis, more straightforward integration of static analysis tools in continuous integration workflows, enhanced Ada and SPARK VS Code support, new targets for Rust, and much more. Full release notes are available here.

Key Events

On September 26th, AdaCore held its Paris Tech Day. We were delighted to welcome customers from all over Europe for a day of technology and roadmap highlights, live demonstrations, networking, and breakout sessions led by our AdaCore experts.

The High Integrity Software Conference (HISC) was held on 22nd October in Newport, Wales. Hosted for the first time at a brand new venue, the ICC Wales, the Organising Committee received highly positive feedback from attendees about the conference co-sponsored by AdaCore and Capgemini. Our team enjoyed meeting customers and high-integrity technology professionals at our AdaCore booth and sharing the latest GNAT Pro for CHERI technology from the SCHEME program’s booth.

During 2024, we also held a Tech Day in Munich, participated in CYBERUK and ERTS, and visited customers at many other conferences and events, including Embedded World and Farnborough International Airshow.

As we close the chapter on 2024, AdaCore reflects on a milestone year that combined celebration, innovation, and forward-looking growth. Our 30th anniversary was not just an opportunity to look back on three decades of pioneering high-integrity software tools but also a chance to lay the groundwork for the next generation of technological advancement. Stepping into 2025, we do so with renewed energy and an unwavering focus on enabling our customers to develop reliable, secure, high-performance software.

Thank you for being part of AdaCore’s journey—here’s to the future of innovation, excellence, and collaboration.