66 entries tagged with #Ada
What makes our software so vulnerable?The majority of today’s technical systems are largely composed of software. As such, the reliability and security of these systems depend heavily on the reliability and security of their software components. And this is precisely where a major problem lies: increasing connectivity and a large number of known vulnerabilities in commonly used software make our systems highly susceptible to attack.
Over the past few years, we've been progressively developing new GNAT extensions for the Ada programming language, which you can follow and contribute to on the github RFC page. While the implementation is ramping up, we can already share a few aspects of the language that can be tested with recent versions of the GNAT Pro compiler, which will eventually find their way to the open-source version.Let's play a game. The code below is an - arguably over-engineered - version of a tic-tac-toe game. Can you find the 7 differences (or features) introduced by the Ada extensions? Note that some of these are only visible on one line, some have an impact across the entire application.If you want to compile this code, you will need both a GNAT Pro wavefront with the latest changes in, and the switch -gnatX0 that enables all experimental features
The March edition of the TIOBE Index shows Ada in the top 20, hitting position 18. This shows a renewed interest in Ada, perhaps due to the increased interest in memory-safe languages and software safety and correctness in general.
A new Learn course is now available, focusing on how to use the Ada language to express common idioms, both language-dependent and -independent.
Developing a game engine often requires a highly optimized linear algebra library for tasks like physics, camera movement, and AI. While many languages already have mature options, Ada’s ecosystem lacks such solutions. To fill this gap, I created Neo.SIMD as part of the AdaDoom3 project. Neo.SIMD takes advantage of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions, which process multiple data points in parallel and can greatly improve performance for vector and matrix operations.
The Neorv32 BIOS project demonstrates how Ada can serve as a powerful alternative to C in open-source embedded development. Using a fully open-source stack—including Neorv32 (a VHDL-based RISC-V softcore), the ULX3S FPGA board, and an open FPGA toolchain—this project showcases Ada’s suitability for system programming, from low-level hardware interactions to high-level software abstraction.
In 2024 we announced our fourth Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. We see the Alire source package manager as a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use the Crate of the Year awards to honor the people contributing to the ecosystem. Today we are pleased to announce the results.
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 the 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!
Introducing the Ada language with a fun 3D rendering project
We're thrilled to kick off the holiday season with the third 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.
At AdaCore, we’re in the business of supporting people who develop high-integrity software, in particular for embedded systems. In terms of programming languages, this means supporting the most commonly found candidates, which in 2024 include C/C++, Ada/SPARK, and Rust. If you’ve already made your decision, we will support you. However, in a number of situations, people ask us: “What should we do? What’s the best out there?”. While it’s difficult to give a one-size-fits-all answer, there are some strategic elements to consider.
In April 2024 a streamer named Tsoding developed a video game from start to finish in Ada in 20 days. He seemed to have enjoyed the experience, to the point where he says that Ada will be the next trendy programming language for game development. Ignoring the potential irony in the streamer’s comment, I thought let’s give Ada gamedev a little push in that direction.
Many of our customers ask if we have a "Coding Standard" that we can provide for writing code in Ada or SPARK. The answer has typically been: "We provide GNATcheck, which you can use to create your own." While this provides a lot of flexibility and control to the end user, sometimes a developer just wants to get things up and running as quickly as possible, and a generic coding standard is all that's needed. That's why AdaCore decided to help by creating a baseline coding standard that you can use as-is, or modify to fit your needs.
A few days ago, someone posted a request for the Abacus Commodore 64 Ada compiler on the reddit Ada channel. After a quick look at the manual I decided to give it a try using a C64 emulator. How hard can it be?
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.
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.
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.
How we're using Libadalang to create an automated Ada code reducer.
A new online Learn course has been published offering an Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming.
Fuzzing Out Bugs in Safety-Critical Embedded Software: Paul Butcher from AdaCore talks to Brandon Lewis from Embedded Toolbox
A retrospective on learning Ada and developing a tool with it in 2021 from 2021 Ada Crate of the Year Winner Paul Jarrett.
Ada has a concurrency construct known as “entry families” that, in some cases, is just what we need to express a concise, clear solution.
The FACE™ approach is a government-industry initiative for reducing defense system life cycle costs through portable and reusable software components. It consists of a technical approach — a software standard based on well-defined common interfaces — and a business strategy for encouraging the development and deployment of FACE conformant products.
John Singleton's The SmartBase makes your existing adjustable bed safer and easier to use by adding voice control and safe (and fun!) LED underbed lighting! Additionally, this project won first place prize in the 2019/20 Make with Ada competition.
This blog entry describes the transformation of an Ada stack ADT into a completely proven SPARK implementation that relies on static verification instead of run-time enforcement of the abstraction’s semantics. We will prove that there are no reads of unassigned variables, no array indexing errors, no range errors, no numeric overflow errors, no attempts to push onto a full stack, no attempts to pop from an empty stack, that subprogram bodies implement their functional requirements, and so on. As a result, we get a maximally robust implementation of a reusable stack abstraction providing all the facilities required for production use.
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.
Interested in participating in the evolution of the Ada or SPARK languages? We have something for you.
C is the dominant language of the embedded world, almost to the point of exclusivity. Due to its age, and its goal of being a “portable assembler”, it deliberately lacks type-safety, opening up exploit vectors. Proposed solutions are partitioning the application into smaller intercommunicating blocks, designed with the principle of least privilege in mind; and rewriting the application in a type-safe language. We believe that both approaches are complementary and want to show you how to combine separation and isolation provided by MultiZone together with iteratively rewriting parts in Ada. We will take the MultiZone SDK demo and rewrite one of the zones in Ada.
The Danish Technical University has a yearly RoboCup where autonomous vehicles solve a number of challenges. We participated with RoadRunner, a 3D printed robot with wheel suspension, based on the BeagleBone Blue ARM-based board and the Pixy 1 camera with custom firmware enabling real-time line detection. Code is written in Ada and formally proved correct with SPARK at Silver level.
Like last year, we've sent a squad of AdaCore engineers to participate in the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. Like last year, we had great interactions with the rest of the Ada and SPARK Community in the Ada devroom on Saturday. That's what we have to say about it.
When I bought the TinyFPGA-BX board, I thought it would be an opportunity to play a little bit with FPGA, learn some Verilog or VHDL. But when I discovered that it was possible to have a RISC-V CPU on it, I knew I had to run Ada code on it.
We are very proud to announce the availability of our new Ada and SPARK learning platform learn.adacore.com, which will replace AdaCoreU(niversity) e-learning platform. Learn all about it in this blog post.
There is a long-standing debate about which phase in the Software Development Life Cycle causes the most bugs: is it the specification phase or the coding phase? A recent study by NIST shows that, in the software industry at large, coding bugs are causing the majority of security issues. Choosing a safer language like Ada or SPARK is a critical component for reducing these vulnerabilities that result from simple mistakes. In a new freely available booklet, we explain how these languages and the associated toolsets can be used to increase the security of software.
Updated July 2018
Bitcoin is getting a lot of press recently, but let's be honest, that's mostly because a single bitcoin worth 800 USD in January 2017 was worth almost 20,000 USD in December 2017. However, bitcoin and its underlying blockchain are beautiful technologies that are worth a closer look. Let’s take that look with our Ada hat on!
Libadalang has come a long way since the last time we blogged about it. In the past 6 months, we have been working tirelessly on name resolution, a pretty complicated topic in Ada, and it is finally ready enough that we feel ready to blog about it, and encourage people to try it out.
SummaryThe Ada IoT Stack consists of an lwIp (“lightweight IP”) stack implementation written in Ada, with an associated high-level protocol to support embedded device connectivity nodes for today’s IoT world. The project was developed for the Make With Ada 2017 competition based on existing libraries and ported to embedded STM32 devices.
As we see the importance of software grow in applications, the quality of that software has become more and more important. Even outside the mission- and safety-critical arena customers are no longer accepting software failures (the famous blue screens of death, and there are many...). Ada has a very strong answer here and we are seeing more and more interest in using the language from a range of industries. It is for this reason that we have completed our product line by including an entry-level offer for C/C++ developers wanting to switch to Ada and reinforced our existing offer with GNAT Pro Assurance for programmers building the most robust software platforms with life cycles spanning decades.
The first thing that struck me when I started to learn about the Ada programing language was the tasking support. In Ada, creating tasks, synchronizing them, sharing access to resources, are part of the language
While we are working very hard on semantic analysis in Libadalang, it is already possible to leverage its lexical and syntactic analyzers. A useful example for this is a syntax highlighter.
The Adaroombot project consists of an iRobot CreateⓇ 2 and Ada running on a Raspberry Pi with a Linux OS. This is a great Intro-to-Ada project as it focuses on a control algorithm and a simple serial communications protocol. The iRobot CreateⓇ 2 platform was originally design for STEM education and has great documentation and support - making it very easy to create a control application using Ada. This blog looks at the creation of the project and some cool features of Ada that were learned along the way.
Updated July 2018
A few weeks ago one of my colleagues shared this kickstarter project : The Barisieur. It’s an alarm clock coffee maker, promising to wake you up with a freshly brewed cup of coffee every morning. I jokingly said “just give me an espresso machine and I can do the same”. Soon after, the coffee machine is in my office. Now it is time to deliver :)
User friendly strings APIIn a previous post, we described the design of a new strings package, with improved performance compared to the standard Ada unbounded strings implementation. That post focused on various programming techniques used to make that package as fast as possible.
This post describes the new GNATCOLL.Strings package, and the various optimizations it performs to provide improved performance.
The Ada Drivers Library (ADL) is a collection of Ada device drivers and examples for ARM-based embedded targets. The library is maintained by AdaCore, with development originally (and predominantly) by AdaCore personnel but also by the Ada community at large. It is available on GitHub and is licensed for both proprietary and non-proprietary use.
AdaCore is working on a host of tools that works on Ada code. The compiler, GNAT, is the most famous and prominent one, but it is far from being the only one. At AdaCore, we already have several other tools to process Ada code: the ASIS library, GNAT2XML, the GPS IDE. A realization of the past years, however, has been that we were lacking a unified solution to process code that is potentially evolving, potentially incorrect Ada code. Hence Libadalang.
There are moments in life where you find yourself with an AdaFruit thermal printer in one hand, and an OpenMV camera in the other.
One of the interesting aspects of developing software for a bare-board target is that displaying complex application-created information typically requires more than the target board can handle. Although some boards do have amazing graphics capabilities, in some cases you need to have the application on the target interact with applications on the host. This can be due to the existence of special applications that run only (or already) on the host, in particular.
Using Ada technologies to develop video games doesn’t sound like an an obvious choice - although it seems like there could be an argument to be made. The reverse, however, opens some more straightforward perspectives.
If you’ve been looking for a way to start your next embedded project in Ada or SPARK. Then, look no further than the Make with Ada competition!
I recently started working on an Ada binding for the excellent libuv C library. This library provides a convenient API to perform asynchronous I/O under an event loop, which is a popular way to develop server stacks. A central part of this API is its enumeration type for error codes: most functions use it. Hence, one of the first things I had to do was to bind the enumeration type for error codes. Believe it or not: this is harder than it first seems!
I started this project more than a year ago. It was supposed to be the first Make with Ada project but it became the most challenging from both, the hardware and software side.
Dr Carl Brandon of Vermont Technical College and his team of students used SPARK and Ada to successfully launch a satellite into space in 2013 and it has continued to orbit the Earth ever since! At our AdaCore Tech Days in Boston last year Dr Brandon explained further.
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.
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.
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.
I started out as an electronic musician, so one of my original motivations when I learnt programming was so that I could eventually *program* the sounds I wanted rather than just use already existing software to do it.
A few weeks ago I discovered the wonderful world of solenoid engines. The idea is simple: take a piston engine and replace explosion with electromagnetic field. In this article I will experiment a solenoid engine using a hacked hard drive and a software controller on a STM32F4 .
Reference countingReference counting is a way to automatically reclaim unused memory. An element is automatically deallocated as soon as there are no more references to it in the program.
This post shows how to implement a special storage pool that allocates an extra header every time it allocates some memory. This can be used to store type specific information, outside of the type itself.
Despite her famously sharp analytical mind, it’s unlikely Ada Lovelace could have predicted the durability of her legacy as the world’s first computer programmer and pioneer for women in computing.
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.
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.
If you have a passion for Ada, need more information on our technology or would just like to have a chat, there are a couple of upcoming events where we'd love to meet up. What's more, we'll be launching our brand new product QGen at Embedded World!