Some time ago, we announced some updates to the learn website. In the meantime, we published the Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming course and the initial parts of the Advanced Journey with Ada course. Today, we'd like to announce some updates that have been made to the learn website since then.
At the end of November we called the Ada and SPARK programmers community to take on a challenge for a good cause. For each person completing one of the Advent of Code exercises using the Ada programming language, AdaCore would donate $10 to the Ada Developers Academy. And for those willing to go an extra mile, AdaCore would donate $20 if the solution is implemented in SPARK. We are now in January and it is time for the results!
We're thrilled to kick off the holiday season with the second edition of Advent of Ada, a programming challenge that not only tests your coding skills but also contributes to a meaningful cause.As many of you know, Advent of Code has become a beloved tradition since its inception in 2015. The concept is simple yet brilliant: from December 1st to 25th, every day a new small programming exercise is published on the adventofcode.com website. Participants get points for each completed exercise.
This is the first part of a series in which we’ll implement a GNAT SAS analysis pipeline for Ada code on GitLab by making use of GNAT SAS 24 new features. We are focusing on getting a pipeline that "Just Works(tm)", leaving more advanced issues such as scalability, improvement of user experience, or maintainability for later.
This blog post describes how Ada and SPARK provide memory safety through a combination of language features, run-time checks, and static and dynamic analysis tools.
This blog post explains the concept of memory safety and the most common memory errors. Then, it introduces three memory-safe languages that have built-in countermeasures against memory errors.
Today, we at wolfSSL (https://www.wolfssl.com/) are happy to announce the availability of an Ada/SPARK binding that enables Ada applications to use post-quantum TLS 1.3 encryption through the wolfSSL embedded SSL/TLS library. The wolfSSL library is thread safe by design. Multiple threads can enter the library simultaneously without creating conflicts because wolfSSL avoids global data, static data, and the sharing of objects. When objects are used in the API the wolfSSL library provides opaque pointers to objects whose contents is only known internally by the wolfSSL library. This library interface design makes it easy to make bindings to other programming languages and at the same time enables the contents of the objects used internally to be highly configurable.
Today I want to go over some internal mechanisms of a Photoshop-like application to better illustrate an up-and-coming tech, GNAT for CUDA®, developed at AdaCore.
We are happy to announce the availability of GNAT Pro for C++, a versatile development environment for bare-metal targets capable of supporting different subsets of the C++ language. It constitutes the best choice for safety-critical bare-metal systems that want to reduce complexity, memory footprint and execution-time overhead, paving the way to software certification. GNAT Pro for C++ targets popular hardware in the avionics, defense, railway, and space domains: PowerPC (32 bits), x86 (64 bits), RISC-V (32/64 bits), LEON3 (32 bits) and ARM (32/64 bits).
Back in the 90s when AdaCore was founded, the state of IT security was very different. A unique Unix login and password were enough to connect to a shared server and run business applications. Most of the protocols used were still unencrypted, and the most elaborate access controls were based on Unix groups and perimeter defense. As the company evolved, we gave users access to more and more services, some not hosted on-premise. More services meant distinct credentials. Security-savvy users, who did not accept reusing the same password everywhere, had the burden of maintaining all these distinct credentials. Most credentials were long-lived, and very often shared. Also as the notion of perimeter defense became more and more fuzzy with the introduction of PaaS, IaaS, .. the need for safer access and communication protocols increased significantly.
Tetris was the first computer game played in space but let's review our ambitions for the time and try to implement it on a Raspberry Pico first. This idea appeared during my internship at AdaCore. The main purpose of my internship was to explore the possibilities of formal verification in device drivers using SPARK. It seemed both very challenging and valuable to prove such low-level code to ensure safety and security.
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.
This blog entry shows how to define protected types that extend the language-defined priority inheritance for protected actions to the statements outside those protected actions. We create a mutex type for illustration.
Programming device drivers requires certain practices or operations. These include, for example, the multitude of volatile variables in the code. On the other hand, SPARK imposes a number of restrictions on programs and also limits the use of certain practices permitted in Ada. Here's a list of hurdles I encountered during my internship involving driver code and the rules authorized by SPARK. I also present ways of getting around these problems, as well as some best practices for having the most SPARK-compatible code in advance. This list is not exhaustive.
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, which was designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages. Wasm can be executed in browsers, native runtimes and embedded contexts.The goal of my six-month internship at AdaCore was to draft a design for a toolchain that would support an Ada/SPARK workflow to WebAssembly. In this blog post the drafted design is introduced and discussed.
AdaCore has two announcements about Rust that we’d like to share with you!
Every year the GNAT Pro product family acquires new members and capabilities, to help our customers develop safer, more secure and more efficient code on newer hardware and software platforms. Moving forward, our goal is to offer a clear view on the future development of our technology. As part of this effort, we have made available a public roadmap for AdaCore products on our documentation platform.
The VSS (as an abbreviation for Virtual String Subsystem) library is designed to provide advanced string and text processing capabilities. It offers a convenient and robust API that allows developers to work with Unicode text, regardless of its internal representation. Last time we provided overview of the library, and in this article, we will introduce concepts of cursors that are used to iterate, retrieve, and modify text data.
When teaching SPARK to my students, I generally explain the central position of contracts in formal verification in the following way: Contracts of subprograms summarize their behavior - preconditions constrain their inputs, while postconditions describe their effects. It is an easy way to see contracts, However, not returning normally, for example looping forever or raising exceptions, is definitely a significant effect of a subprogram. Modeling that effect would be beneficial because if it occurs in an unexpected way it might cause the entire program to derail. Release 24.0 of SPARK includes contracts that can be used to reason about subprograms which do not return normally. This blog post describes them.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our highly anticipated course, "Advanced Journey with Ada: A Flight in Progress," which explores the advanced concepts of Ada programming. This course serves as a seamless continuation of our esteemed "Introduction to Ada" course.
