by Rob Tice
16 entries tagged with #Compilation
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?
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.by Lionel Matias
Leveraging Ada Run-Time Checks with Fuzz Testing in AFL
Fuzzing is a very popular bug finding method. The concept, very simple, is to continuously inject random (garbage) data as input of a software component, and wait for it to crash. If, like me, you find writing robustness test tedious and not very efficient in finding bugs, you might want to try fuzzing your Ada code. Here's a recipe to fuzz-test your Ada code, using American Fuzzy Lop and all the runtime checks your favorite Ada compiler can provide. Let's see (quickly) how AFL works, then jump right into fuzzing 3 open-source Ada libraries: ZipAda, AdaYaml, and GNATCOLL.JSON.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.by Yannick Moy
Research Corner - Focused Certification of SPARK in Coq
The SPARK toolset aims at giving guarantees to its users about the properties of the software analyzed, be it absence of runtime errors or more complex properties. But the SPARK toolset being itself a complex tool, it is not free of errors. To get confidence in its results, we have worked with academic partners to establish mathematical evidence of the correctness of a critical part of the SPARK toolset. The part on which we focused is the tagging of nodes requiring run-time checks by the frontend of the SPARK technology. This work has been accepted at SEFM 2017 conference.by Fabien Chouteau, Arnaud Charlet, Yannick Moy
SPARK Tetris on the Arduboy
One of us got hooked on the promise of a credit-card-size programmable pocket game under the name of Arduboy and participated in its kickstarter in 2015. The kickstarter was successful (but late) and delivered the expected working board in mid 2016. Of course, the idea from the start was to program it in Ada , but this is an 8-bits AVR microcontroller (the ATmega32u4 by Atmel) not supported anymore by GNAT Pro. One solution would have been to rebuild our own GNAT compiler for 8-bit AVR from the GNAT FSF repository and use the AVR-Ada project. Another solution, which we explore in this blog post, is to use the SPARK-to-C compiler that we developed at AdaCore to turn our Ada code into C and then use the Arduino toolchain to compile for the Arduboy board.
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.by Pierre-Marie de Rodat
C library bindings: GCC plugins to the rescue
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!
by Jérôme Lambourg
Efficient use of Simics for testing
As seen in the previous blog article, AdaCore relies heavily on virtualisation to perform the testing of its GNAT Pro products for VxWorks.
by Yannick Moy
How Our Compiler Learnt From Our Analyzers
Program analyzers interpret the source code of a program to compute some information. Hopefully, the way they interpret the program is consistent with the way that the compiler interprets it to generate an executable, or the information computed is irrelevant, possibly misleading. For example, if the analyzer says that there are no possible run-time errors in a program, and you rely on this information to compile with dynamic checking off, it is crucial that no run-time error could occur as a result of a divergence of opinion between the analyzer and the compiler on the meaning of an instruction. We recently discovered such an inconsistency in how our compiler and analyzers dealt with floating-point exponentiation, which lead to a change in how GNAT now compile these operations.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.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.