AdaCore Blog

An Insight Into the AdaCore Ecosystem

by Karen Mason –

What's in the Box?

Forget about the black box - we want you to see what's in the AdaCore box! Our machine room, the life blood of the company, is centered in the office space in a glass box and is pure eye candy for geeks and cable aficionados. The machine room is 204 sq ft (19 sq meters), contains 73 machines (running the gamut from VxWorks, Linux, Windows, Android and more) 1.5 miles of cables and a state of the art fire suppression mechanism! Oh and the modern air intake system gives it a green energy seal of approval. In the unlikely event of a fire; the smoke detectors allow 30 seconds before dispersing an agent called FM200 which will suppress the fire but not damage the equipment. The economizer takes advantage of winters' freeze and draws cool air from the outside to cool the machine room and the heated air is then spilled to common office areas thus reducing heating costs. We're proud to show-off the hardware side of our software!

#cable porn   

by Emma Adby –

Verification on Ada code with Static and Dynamic Code Analysis - Webinar

One of the main challenges to get certification in Ada projects is the achievement of 100% code coverage but in most projects an amount of more than 95% structural coverage is hard to achieve. What can you do with the last 5% of code that can't be covered? DO-178C for example, provides a framework for the integration of various techniques in the development process to solve the problem. In this webinar you learn how static analysis and dynamic testing can help complete analysis for pieces of code that are not covered.

#CodePeer    #Code Coverage    #Dynamic Analysis    #Static Analysis    #DO-178    #DO-178C   

by Claire Dross –

A quick glimpse at the translation of Ada integer types in GNATprove

In SPARK, as in most programming languages, there are a bunch of bounded integer types. On the other hand, Why3 only has mathematical integers and a library for bitvectors. Since bitwise operations can only be done on modular types in Ada, we currently translate arithmetic operations on signed integer types as operations on mathematical integers and arithmetic operations on modular types as operation on bitvectors. The only remaining question now is, how do we encode specific bounds of the Ada types into our Why3 translation ? In this post, I will present three different ways we tried to do this and explain which one we currently use and why.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Martyn Pike –

The latest Mixed Programming with Ada lectures at the AdaCore University

I recently joined AdaCore as a Technical Account Manager with an initial focus on the UK and Scandinavian regions, but for the last 12 months I've been busy working on the AdaCore University. The most recent addition to which is a course on Mixed Language Programming with Ada, and it includes lectures on the integration of Ada with C, C++ and Java. The course covers some advanced topics like mixed language object orientation, techniques for using Ada strong typing to combat known issue with C pointers and the pitfalls that are encountered when mixing native Ada code with Java at runtime. This course clearly demonstrates that Ada has strong support for integration with C, C++ and Java and it proves there are no technical barriers to its adoption in modern mixed language software systems.

#Mixed Language    #AdaCore University    #Java    #C++    #C    

by Yannick Moy –
A Building Code for Building Code

A Building Code for Building Code

In a recent article in Communications of the ACM, Carl Landwehr, a renowned scientific expert on security, defends the view that the software engineering community is doing overall a poor job at securing our global information system and that this is mostly avoidable by putting what we know works to work, to the point that most vulnerabilities could be completely avoided by design if we cared enough. Shocking! Or so it should appear.

#Ada    #SPARK    #Static Analysis    #Security   

by Clément Fumex – Guest Author

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: Bitwise Operations

The ProofInUse joint laboratory is currently improving the way SPARK deals with modular types and bitwise operators. Until now the SPARK tool was trying its best to translate those into equivalent operations on integers. It is now using native theory of smt-solvers when available resulting in much better support, and guaranteeing state of the art handling of bitwise operations. We present some examples in this post.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Olivier Ramonat –

AdaCore Releases GNAT Pro 7.3, QGen 1.0 and GNATdashboard 1.0

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.

#GNAT Pro    #SPARK Pro    #GPS    #GNATbench    #GNATdashboard    #Ada    #AdaCore Factory    #CodePeer    #QGen   

by Yannick Moy –

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: Catching Mistakes in Contracts

Contracts may be quite complex, as complex as code in fact, so it is not surprising that they contain errors sometimes. GNATprove can help by pinpointing suspicious constructs that, although legal, do not make much sense. These constructs are likely to be caused by mistakes made by the programmer when writing the contract. In this post, I show examples of incorrect constructs that are signaled by GNATprove.

#Formal Verification    #Compilation    #SPARK   

by Tristan Gingold –

AdaCore at FOSDEM'15

I was at Bruxelles on January 31st to present the components of GNAT GPL 2015 : SPARK 2014 and GNAT GPL for ARM bare-board. This is not unrelated to a previous blog entry on Tetris in SPARK on ARM Cortex M4, in particular I presented that Tetris demo (I brought some boards with me and despite the simple package, none were broken!). The slides contain technical details on the ravenscar profile (main principles), how to build a program for the stm32f4-discovery board and how to port the runtime. There are also less technical slides such as why we choose the stm32f4 board and photos of some graphical demos. As that could be useful to anyone interested in Ravenscar or in porting the runtime to other boards or other platforms, we've made the slides available here.

#ARM    #Ravenscar    #FOSDEM    #GNATGPL