We are pleased to announce our latest release of SPARK Pro! A product that has been jointly developed alongside our partner Altran and following the global AdaCore Tech Days, you can now see the SPARK 2014 talk, Formal Verification Made Easy by AdaCore’s Hristian Kirtchev, on YouTube.
We are pleased to announce that we will be a major sponsor and exhibitor at ERTS, Toulouse and will be exhibiting at Embedded World, Nuremberg in the coming months!
A step by step tutorial to adapt the ARM runtime to new MCUs/boards.
The three of us attended the Ada Lovelace Symposium in Oxford (UK). The two days were one fantastic discovery after another about the life, achievements and legacy of Ada Lovelace, the programming pioneer who lent her name to the Ada language.
Frederick Pothon of ACG Solutions has recently published a document entitled - Dissimilar tools: Use cases and impact on tool qualification level on the open-DO blog.
SPARK supports two ways of encoding reals in a program: the usual floating-point reals, following the standard IEEE 754, and the lesser known fixed-point reals, called this way because their precision is fixed (contrary to floating-points whose precision varies with the magnitude of the encoded number). This support is limited in some ways when it comes to proving properties of computations on real numbers, and these limitations depend strongly in the encoding chosen. In this post, I show the results of applying GNATprove on simple programs using either floating-point or fixed-point reals, to explain these differences.
As presented in a recent post by Pavlos, the upcoming release of SPARK Pro will support concurrency features of Ada, with the restrictions defined in the Ravenscar profile of Ada. This profile restricts concurrency so that concurrent programs are deterministic and schedulable. SPARK analysis makes it possible to prove that shared data is protected against data races, that deadlocks cannot occur and that no other run-time errors related to concurrency can be encountered when running the program. In this post, I revisit the example given by Pavlos to show SPARK features and GNATprove analysis in action.
This short post describes an idiom that can be used to help maintain complex hierarchies of tagged types, when methods need to call the parent types methods.
The new big feature of the SPARK 2016 release is the support of the Ravenscar profile. Users can now use protected objects and tasks to write concurrent code. On uniprocessor computers the toolset can ensure that no deadlocks or data races will occur and that no tasks will terminate. Read this blog post to learn more and see the new feature in practice.
When the Pebble Time kickstarter went through the roof, I looked at the specification and noticed the watch was running on an STM32F4, an ARM cortex-M4 CPU which is supported by GNAT. So I backed the campaign, first to be part of the cool kids and also to try some Ada hacking on the device.
Through the adoption of GitHub we have taken our first step on the way to having a more collaborative and dynamic interaction with, both our users and open source technologies.
While the analysis of failed proofs is one of the most challenging aspects of formal verification, it would be much easier if a tool would automatically find values of variables showing why a proof fails. SPARK Pro 16, to be released in 2016, is going to introduce such a feature. If a proof fails, it attempts to generate a counterexample exhibiting the problem. This post introduces this new feature, developed in the scope of the ProofInUse laboratory.
We are continuing to develop tools for use within projects that require reliable and secure embedded software for ARM. Our engineering team have been busy creating demos running on ARM technology, such as Tetris in SPARK on ARM Cortex M4.
One of the most difficult tasks when using proof techniques is to interact with provers, in particular to progressively increase proof power until everything that should be proved is proved. Until the last release, increasing the proof power meant operating on three separate switches. There is now a simpler solution based on a new switch --level, together with a simpler proof panel in GPS for new users.
The Ada 2012 standard introduced user-defined references. The main idea behind this is simplifying the access to elements in a container. But you can use them to control the life-circle of your persistent objects. Let's see how it could work.
We are excited to be sponsoring and exhibiting at the 2nd annual High Integrity Software conference, taking place on 5th November 2015 at The Royal Marriott Hotel in Bristol.
The SPARK tools now support yet another feature that allows users to better specify the intended behavior of their programs. This new feature enables users to declare that specific variables can only be updated during the elaboration of their enclosing package. Read on if you want to know more...
Based on our many years of experience with our customers using SPARK in their projects, we have come up with a list of eight objectives that are most commonly targeted when using SPARK. Most projects only target a few of them, but in theory one could try to achieve all of them with SPARK on a project. This list may be useful for those who want to assess if the SPARK technology can be of benefit in their context, and to existing SPARK users to compare their existing practice with what others do.
This post describes the design of a new containers library. It highlights some of the limitations of the standard Ada containers, and proposes a new approach using generic packages as formal parameters to make these new containers highly configurable at compile time.
