AdaCore Blog

36 entries tagged with #Ada 2012

by Pamela Trevino

Public Ada Training Paris June 3-7, 2019

This course is geared to software professionals looking for a practical introduction to the Ada language with a focus on embedded systems, including real-time features as well as critical features introduced in Ada 2012. By attending this course you will understand and know how to use Ada for both sequential and concurrent applications, through a combination of live lectures from AdaCore's expert instructors and hands-on workshops using AdaCore's latest GNAT technology. AdaCore will provide an Ada 2012 tool-chain and ARM-based target boards for embedded workshops. No previous experience with Ada is required.

by Yannick Moy, Nicolas Setton, Ben Brosgol

A Readable Introduction to Both MISRA C and SPARK Ada

MISRA C is the most widely known coding standard restricting the use of the C programming language for critical software. For good reasons. For one, its focus is entirely on avoiding error-prone programming features of the C programming language rather than on enforcing a particular programming style. In addition, a large majority of rules it defines are checkable automatically (116 rules out of the total 159 guidelines), and many tools are available to enforce those. As a coding standard, MISRA C even goes out of its way to define a consistent sub-language of C, with its own typing rules (called the "essential type model" in MISRA C) to make up for the lack of strong typing in C.

#MISRA-C    #SPARK    #Safety    #Security   

by Pamela Trevino

Public Ada Training Paris, France Dec 3 - 7, 2018

This course is geared to software professionals looking for a practical introduction to the Ada language with a focus on embedded systems, including real-time features as well as critical features introduced in Ada 2012. By attending this course you will understand and know how to use Ada for both sequential and concurrent applications, through a combination of live lectures from AdaCore's expert instructors and hands-on workshops using AdaCore's latest GNAT technology. AdaCore will provide an Ada 2012 tool-chain and ARM-based target boards for embedded workshops. No previous experience with Ada is required.

by Julia Teissl

Train control using Ada on a Raspberry Pi

I was looking for a topic for my master thesis in embedded systems engineering when one of my advisor proposed the idea of programming a control system for autonomous trains in Ada. Since I am fascinated by the idea of autonomous vehicles I agreed immediately without knowing Ada. 

by Rob Tice

SPARKZumo Part 1: Ada and SPARK on Any Platform

So you want to use SPARK for your next microcontroller project? Great choice! All you need is an Ada 2012 ready compiler and the SPARK tools. But what happens when an Ada 2012 compiler isn’t available for your architecture?

#CCG    #SPARK    #Arduino    #RISC V    #embedded   

by Felix Krause

The Road to a Thick OpenGL Binding for Ada: Part 2

This blog post is part two of a tutorial based on the OpenGLAda project and will cover implementation details such as a type system for interfacing with C, error handling, memory management, and loading functions.

#OpenGL    #Binding   

by Felix Krause

The Road to a Thick OpenGL Binding for Ada: Part 1

This blog post is part one of a tutorial based on the OpenGLAda project and will cover some the background of the OpenGL API and the basic steps involved in importing platform-dependent C functions.

#OpenGL    #Binding   

by J. German Rivera

Make with Ada 2017- A "Swiss Army Knife" Watch

Summary  The Hexiwear is an IoT wearable development board that has two NXP Kinetis microcontrollers. One is a K64F (Cortex-M4 core) for running the main embedded application software. The other one is a KW40 (Cortex M0+ core) for running a wireless connectivity stack (e.g., Bluetooth BLE or Thread). The Hexiwear board also has a rich set of peripherals, including OLED display, accelerometer, magnetometer, gryroscope, pressure sensor, temperature sensor and heart-rate sensor. This blog article describes the development of a "Swiss Army Knife" watch on the Hexiwear platform. It is a bare-metal embedded application developed 100% in Ada 2012, from the lowest level device drivers all the way up to the application-specific code, for the Hexiwear's K64F microcontroller. I developed Ada drivers for Hexiwear-specific peripherals from scratch, as they were not supported by AdaCore's Ada drivers library. Also, since I wanted to use the GNAT GPL 2017 Ada compiler but the GNAT GPL distribution did not include a port of the Ada Runtime for the Hexiwear board, I also had to port the GNAT GPL 2017 Ada runtime to the Hexiwear. All this application-independent code can be leveraged by anyone interested in developing Ada applications for the Hexiwear wearable device.

by Yannick Moy, Martin Becker, Emanuel Regnath

Physical Units Pass the Generic Test

The support for physical units in programming languages is a long-standing issue, which very few languages have even attempted to solve. This issue has been mostly solved for Ada in 2012 by our colleagues Ed Schonberg and Vincent Pucci who introduced special aspects for specifying physical dimensions on types. This dimension system did not attempt to deal with generics though. As was noted by others, handling generics in a dimensional analysis that is, like in GNAT, a compile-time analysis with no impact on the executable size or running time, is the source of the problem of dimension handling. Together with our partners from Technical Universitat München, we have finally solved this remaining difficulty.

#GNAT     #typing   

by Emmanuel Briot

User-friendly strings API

User friendly strings API In 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.

#Ada    #gnatcoll   

by Pat Rogers

Getting started with the Ada Drivers Library device drivers

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.

#Ada    #Devices    #drivers    #STM32    #embedded   

by AdaCore Admin

Make With Ada Winners Announced!

Judging for the first annual Make with Ada competition has come to an end and we can now reveal the results.

by Claire Dross

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Support for Type Invariants

Type invariants are used to model properties that should always hold for users of a data type but can be broken inside the data type implementation. Type invariant are part of Ada 2012 but were not supported in SPARK until SPARK Pro 17.

#SPARK   

by Quentin Ochem

Unity & Ada

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.

#GitHub    #Ada    #GNAT    

by AdaCore Admin

VectorCAST/Ada: Ada 2012 Language Support

We are pleased to announce that on April 27th our partner, Vector, will host a webinar to showcase their latest VectorCAST/Ada release!

by AdaCore Admin

Provably safe programming at Embedded World

AdaCore continues to build reliable and secure software for embedded software development tools. Last month, we attended Embedded World 2016, one of the largest conferences of its kind in Europe, to present our embedded solutions and our expertise for safety, and mission critical applications in a variety of domains.

#ARM    #emb2016    #embedded    #Embedded World   

by AdaCore Admin

Formal Verification Made Easy!

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.

#SPARK Pro    #SPARK2014     #SPARKPro16   

by Maxim Reznik, Nicolas Setton

Using reference types to handle persistent objects

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.

#Ada 2012    #Persistent Objects    #Programming    

by AdaCore Admin

AdaCore Tech Days 2015

#AdaCoreTechDay    #GNAT Pro    #CodePeer    #SPARK Pro    #SPARK    #QGen   

by Emmanuel Briot

Traits-Based Containers

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.

#Ada    #Containers    #Generics   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Type Predicates

Preconditions and postconditions define a very strong mechanism for specifying invariant properties over the program's control. What about similar properties for the program's data? It turns out Ada 2012 defined such a construct, type predicates, which was not supported in SPARK until now. And now it is.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Fabien Chouteau

Make with Ada: "The Eagle has landed"

July 20, 1969, 8:18 p.m. UTC, while a bunch of guys were about to turn blue on Earth, commander Neil A. Armstrong confirms the landing of his Lunar Module (LM), code name Eagle, on the moon. Will you be able to manually land Eagle on the Sea of Tranquillity?

#Makers    #NASA    #GtkAda    #Ada 2012   

by Emmanuel Briot

Count them all (reference counting)

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.

#Ada    #memory management    #Storage Pools   

by Emmanuel Briot

Larger than it looks (storage pools)

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.

#Storage Pools    #Ada    #memory management   

by Jamie Ayre

20 years on...

20 Years of AdaCore: Company as Committed as Ever on Safety-Critical Software Solutions

#20th Anniversary    #AdaLove   

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 Johannes Kanig

Testing, Static Analysis, and Formal Verification

I've recently written an article (in two parts) over at Electronic Design about applying different methods of verification to the same small piece of code. The code in question is an implementation of binary search, and I applied Testing, Static Analysis (using the AdaCore tool CodePeer) and Formal Verification (using the AdaCore tool SPARK 2014).

#Formal Methods    #Static Analysis    #Testing   

by Tristan Gingold, Yannick Moy

Tetris in SPARK on ARM Cortex M4

Tetris is a well-known game from the 80's, which has been ported in many versions to all game platforms since then. There are even versions of Tetris written in Ada. But there was no version of Tetris written in SPARK, so we've repaired that injustice. Also, there was no version of Tetris for the Atmel SAM4S ARM processor, another injustice we've repaired.

#SPARK    #ARM   

by Yannick Moy

Using SPARK to Prove AoRTE in Robot Navigation Software

Correctness of robot software is a challenge. Just proving the absence of run-time errors (AoRTE) in robot software is a challenge big enough that even NASA has not solved it. Researchers have used SPARK to do precisely that for 3 well-known robot navigation algorithms. Their results will be presented at the major robotics conference IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014) this coming September.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK    #Robotics   

by Yannick Moy

Studies of Contracts in Practice

Two recent research papers focus on how program contracts are used in practice in open source projects, in three languages that support contracts (Eiffel obviously, Java with JML contracts and C# with Code Contracts). I'm reporting what I found interesting (and less so) in these two studies.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #Contracts   

by Claire Dross

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Expressing Properties over Formal Containers

We saw in a previous post how formal containers can be used in SPARK code. In this post, I describe how to express properties over the content of these containers, using quantified expressions.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Claire Dross

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Formal Containers

SPARK 2014 excludes data structures based on pointers. Instead, one can use the library of formal containers. They are variant of the Ada 2012 bounded containers, specifically designed and annotated to facilitate the proof of programs using them.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Pre-call and Pre-loop Values

Subprogram contracts are commonly presented as special assertions: the precondition is an assertion checked at subprogram entry, while the postcondition is an assertion checked at subprogram exit. A subtlety not covered by this simplified presentation is that postconditions are really two-state assertions: they assert properties over values at subprogram exit and values at subprogram entry. A special attribute Old is defined in Ada 2012 to support these special assertions. A special attribute Loop_Entry is defined in SPARK 2014 to support similar special assertions for loops.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

MISRA-C 2012 vs SPARK 2014, the Subset Matching Game

The MISRA C subset of C defines around 150 rules that restrict C programs for critical software development. Of these, 27 rules are classified as undecidable, which means that few MISRA C checkers (if any) will help checking those hardest rules. Here is how SPARK 2014 can help checking similar rules in Ada programs.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK    #MISRA-C   

by Johannes Kanig

SPARK 2014 goes to Space!

David Lesens from Astrium was a member of the Hi-Lite project ("was" because the project is finished now, see the previous post), and has tried GNATprove - the formal verification tool for SPARK 2014 - on space vehicle software as an industrial case study of the project. And it turns out GNATprove performed pretty well!

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Contract Cases

Besides the usual expression of a subprogram contract as a pair of a precondition and a postcondition, SPARK 2014 provides a way to express such a contract by cases. A little history helps understanding how we came up with this new feature.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK