Making an RC Car with Ada and SPARK

As a demonstration for the use of Ada and SPARK in very small embedded targets, I created a remote-controlled (RC) car using Lego NXT Mindstorms motors and sensors but without using the Lego computer or Lego software. I used an ARM Cortex System-on-Chip board for the computer, and all the code -- the control program, the device drivers, everything -- is written in Ada. Over time, I’ve upgraded some of the code to be in SPARK. This blog post describes the hardware, the software, the SPARK upgrades, and the repositories that are used and created for this purpose.

#Ada    #SPARK    #Robotics   

A Further Expedition into Libadalang: Save Time with Libadalang.Helpers.App

Martyn’s recent blog post showed small programs based on Libadalang to find uses of access types in Ada sources. Albeit short, these programs need to take care of all the tedious logistics around processing Ada sources: find the files to work on, create a Libadalang analysis context, use it to read the source files, etc. Besides, they are not very convenient to run:

#Libadalang   

Using GNAT-LLVM to target Ada to WebAssembly

The GNAT-LLVM project provides an opportunity to port Ada to new platforms, one of which is WebAssembly. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the porting of Ada and the development of bindings to use Web API provided by the browser directly from Ada applications.

#GNAT     #LLVM    #WebAssembly    #Programming    

AdaCore at FOSDEM 2020

Like last year and the year before, AdaCore will participate to the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. It is always a key event for the Ada/SPARK community and we are looking forward to meet Ada enthusiasts. You can check the program of the Ada/SPARK devroom here.

#FOSDEM   

Ada on a Feather

I was quite happy to see AdaFruit release their first Feather format board including a micro-controller with plenty of Ada support, the STM32F4. I bought a board right away and implemented some support code for it.

#Embedded    #STM32   

AdaCore for HICLASS - Enabling the Development of Complex and Secure Aerospace Systems

What's changed?In 2019 AdaCore created a UK business unit and embarked on a new and collaborative venture researching and developing advanced UK aerospace systems. This blog introduces the reader to ‘HICLASS’, describes our involvement and explains how participation in this project is aligned with AdaCore’s core values.

#SPARK    #UK   

RecordFlux: From Message Specifications to SPARK Code

Handling binary data is hard. Errors in parsers routinely lead to critical security vulnerabilities. In this post we show how the RecordFlux toolset eases the creation of formally verified binary parsers in SPARK.

#Formal Verification    #Formal Methods    #SPARK   

The Power of Technology Integration and Open Source

Part of our core expertise at AdaCore is to integrate multiple technologies as smoothly as possible and make it a product. This started at the very beginning of our company by integrating a code generator (GCC) with an Ada front-end (GNAT) which was then followed by integrating a debugger engine (GDB) and led to today's rich GNAT Pro offering.

#CodePeer    #QGen    #SPARK Pro    #Open Source   

Learning SPARK via Conway's Game of Life

How I learned to write SPARK-provable code using Conway's Game Of Life

#SPARK     #Programming    

Pointer Based Data-Structures in SPARK

As seen in a previous post, it is possible to use pointers (or access types) in SPARK provided the program abides by a strict memory ownership policy designed to prevent aliasing. We will show in this post how to define pointer-based data-structures in SPARK and how to traverse them without breaking the ownership policy.

#SPARK    #Formal Verification   

Combining GNAT with LLVM

Presenting the GNAT LLVM projectAt AdaCore labs, we have been working for some time now on combining the GNAT Ada front-end with a different code generator than GCC.

#GNAT     #LLVM   

First Ada Virtual Conference organized by and for the Ada community

The Ada Community has gathered recently around a new exciting initiative - an Ada Virtual Conference, to present Ada-related topics in a 100% remote event. The first such conference took place on August, 10th 2019, around the topic of the new features in Ada 202x. Here is what was presented.

#virtual    #conference    #Ada   

Secure Use of Cryptographic Libraries: SPARK Binding for Libsodium

The challenge faced by cryptography APIs is to make building functional and secure programs easy for the user. In this blog post I will present you how I created a SPARK binding for Libsodium, using strong typing and preconditions/postconditions to enforce a safe and functional use of basic cryptographic primitives.

#SPARK    #Security    #Cryptography    #Binding   

Proving a simple program doing I/O ... with SPARK

The functionality of many security-critical programs is directly related to Input/Output (I/O). This includes command-line utilities such as gzip, which might process untrusted data downloaded from the internet, but also any servers that are directly connected to the internet, such as webservers, DNS servers and so on. In this blog post we show an approach that deals with error handling and reasoning about content, and demonstrate the approach using the cat command line utility.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

RFCs for Ada and SPARK evolution now on GitHub

Interested in participating in the evolution of the Ada or SPARK languages? We have something for you.

#Ada    #SPARK   

Using Pointers in SPARK

In this blog post, I will present one of the most interesting additions to the community 2019 version of SPARK: pointer support. One of the core assumption in SPARK has always been the absence of aliasing, so adding pointers without breaking this assumption was quite a challenge. I will explain how this was achieved using an ownership model for pointers (like is done in Rust) through small examples.

#VerificationTools