We're happy to announce the third edition of our programming awards, The Ada/SPARK Crate of the Year Award! This time with a different approach as you will see below. We believe 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.

Why “Crate”? This is the name the Alire project uses to designate a software project, library or executable which is written using the Ada and/or SPARK programming languages and contributed to the Alire ecosystem. The word comes from the Cargo package manager.

How to enter?

This year we will not ask you to register for the awards. Instead, we will consider any crate published in the Alire community index as a potential candidate for the awards.

We still invite you to promote your crate, or suggest someone else’s crate for the awards, on the ada-lang.io forum, in this thread here.

Timeline

The only thing that matters is that your crate has to be available in the Alire community index by the end of 2023. In early January 2024 we will select three winner crates and contact the authors in private. We will then announce the results to the public by the end of January 2024.

Prizes

This competition has three prizes of $2,000 each:

• The Ada Crate of the Year Prize, for the best overall Ada crate;

• The SPARK Crate of the Year Prize, for the best crate written in SPARK;

• The Embedded Crate of the Year Prize, for the best Ada or SPARK crate for embedded software.

Getting started with Alire and Ada/SPARK

You can have a look at the Alire documentation to start your first crate. If you don’t know Ada/SPARK programming, we recommend starting with our interactive online courses here.

We also recommend getting in touch with the Ada/SPARK and Alire community. Here are some links that you may find useful:

• Gitter Alire chat room

• Gitter Ada chat room

• Reddit r/ada

• Ada-lang Forum

• Telegram Ada channel

You should also have a look at the existing Alire ecosystem to see if your awesome project idea already exists or to see which existing crates might help in your endeavor.

Have fun and happy hacking!