Designing a WebAssembly toolchain for Ada/SPARK

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.

Announcements around Rust

AdaCore has two announcements about Rust that we’d like to share with you!

GNAT Pro Roadmap

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.

GNAT Pro 21.6 for LYNX MOSA.ic for Avionics (MfA)

AdaCore has partnered closely with Lynx to deliver Ada language support alongside its LYNX MOSA.ic software framework that comprises a real-time operating system (LynxOS-178), Linux and hypervisor (LynxSecure) technology.

AdaCore joins the Rust foundation

Last year we announced our strategic partnership with Ferrous Systems, a technology company specializing in the Rust programming language. Today we are announcing a new step in our involvement with the Rust ecosystem and community

Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year 2022 Winners Announced!

In June of 2022 we launched the second edition of the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. We believe the Alire source package manager is a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use this competition to reward the people contributing to the ecosystem. Today we are pleased to announce the results. But first, we want to congratulate all the participants, and the Alire community at large, for reaching 320 crates in the ecosystem in January of this year. We truly believe in a bright future for the Ada/SPARK open-source ecosystem with Alire at the forefront. Reaching this milestone is a great sign,both inside and outside the Ada/SPARK community, of the evolution and the energy of the ecosystem.

Coroutines in Ada, a Clean but Heavy Implementation

A few months ago I was reading this article about coroutines in game development and how they are great tools for writing scripts (as in movie scripts) in the same language as the game engine. Until then I heard about coroutines but never really gave them a thought, this piqued my curiosity.

New Learn Course: Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming

A new online Learn course has been published offering an Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming.

Adding Ada to Rust

While implementing application logic in Ada or SPARK is an improvement over a pure C project, its weakest link is still the C code in the SDK. On the other hand, there are many libraries, board support packages, and SDKs written in Rust, easily usable with Cargo. So instead of building the Ada application on top of a C base, one could use a Rust base instead to combine the large catalog of ready-to-use software with Rust's safety features, providing a much more solid base for an Ada project.

Fuzzing Out Bugs in Safety-Critical Embedded Software

Fuzzing Out Bugs in Safety-Critical Embedded Software: Paul Butcher from AdaCore talks to Brandon Lewis from Embedded Toolbox

Embedded Ada/SPARK, There's a Shortcut

For years in this blog my colleagues and I have published examples, demos, and how-to’s on Ada/SPARK embedded (as in bare-metal) development. Most of the time, if not always, we focused on one way of doing things: to start from scratch and write everything in Ada/SPARK, from the low level drivers to the application. While this way of doing Ada/SPARK embedded will yield the best results in terms of software quality, it might not be the most efficient in all cases. In this blog post I want to present an alternative method to introduce Ada/SPARK into your embedded development projects.

Announcing The 2022 Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Award

We're happy to announce our the second edition of our programming competition, the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Award! 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.

Announcing Updates to learn.adacore.com

Quite Proved Image Format

A few weeks ago a piece of code went viral in the online dev community. The “Quite OK Image Format” (QOI) is a fast, lossless image compression designed to have a very simple implementation (about 300 lines of C). Shortly, a few alternative implementations popped up here and there, and in this kind of situation we are eager to show what Ada/SPARK can bring to the table.

Ada GameDev Part 2: Making 2D maps with Tiled

In this second post of the Ada GameDev series we will see how to create game maps and export them to a format that is compatible with the GESTE library.

SPARK Crate of the Year: Unbounded containers in SPARK

Manuel Hatzl is the winner of the 2021 SPARK Crate of the year! In this blog post he shares his experience using Ada/​SPARK and how he created the spark_unbound library

Ada GameDev Part 1: GEneric Sprite and Tile Engine (GESTE)

In this first entry of the series, I want to present my GEneric Sprite and Tile Engine (GESTE) project. The goal of GESTE is to bring the rendering and anesthetic of 8bit era game consoles to modern microcontrollers.

Proving the Correctness of GNAT Light Runtime Library

The GNAT light runtime library is a version of the runtime library targeted at embedded platforms and certification, which has been certified for use at the highest levels of criticality in several industrial domains. It contains around 180 units focused mostly on I/O, numerics, text manipulation, memory operations. We have used SPARK to prove the correctness of 40 of them: that the code is free of runtime errors, and that it satisfies its functional specifications.

AdaCore and Ferrous Systems Joining Forces to Support Rust

For over 25 years, AdaCore has been committed to supporting the needs of safety- and mission-critical industries. This started with an emphasis on the Ada programming language and its toolchain, and over the years has been extended to many other technologies. AdaCore’s product offerings today include support for the Ada language and its formally verifiable SPARK subset, C and C++, and Simulink and Stateflow models. We have accomplished this while addressing the requirements of various safety standards such as DO-178B/C, EN 50128, ECSS-E-ST-40C / ECSS-Q-ST-80C, IEC 61508 and ISO 26262.

Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year 2021 Winners Announced!

In June of 2021 we announced the launch of a new programming competition called Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. We believe the Alire source package manager is a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use this competition to reward the people contributing to the ecosystem. Today we are pleased to announce the results. But first, we want to congratulate all the participants, and the Alire community at large, for reaching 200 crates in the ecosystem in January of this year. We truly believe in a bright future for the Ada/SPARK open-source ecosystem with Alire at the forefront. Reaching this milestone is a great sign, inside and outside the Ada/SPARK community, of the evolution and the energy of the ecosystem.

An Embedded USB Device stack in Ada

A couple years ago I started to tackle what was probably my most daunting project at the time, an embedded USB Device stack written 100% in Ada.

Enhancing the Security of a TCP Stack with SPARK

The developers of CycloneTCP library at Oryx Embedded partnered with AdaCore to replace the TCP part of the C codebase by SPARK code, and used the SPARK tools to prove both that the code is not vulnerable to the usual runtime errors (like buffer overflow) and that it correctly implements the TCP automaton specified in RFC 793. As part of this work, we found two subtle bugs related to memory management and concurrency. This work has been accepted for publication at the upcoming IEEE SecDev 2021 conference.

Security-Hardening Software Libraries with Ada and SPARK

Part of AdaCore's ongoing efforts under the HICLASS project is to demonstrate how the SPARK technology can play an integral part in the security-hardening of existing software libraries written in other non-security-oriented programming languages such as C. This blog post presents the first white paper under this work-stream, “Security-Hardening Software Libraries with Ada and SPARK”.

Announcing The First Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Award

We're happy to announce our new programming competition, the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Award! 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.

An Introduction to Jorvik, the New Tasking Profile in Ada 2022

The Ada 2022 draft defines a new tasking profile named Jorvik (pronounced “Yourvick”), based directly on the standard Ravenscar profile. Jorvik relaxes certain restrictions in order to increase expressive power for real-time/embedded Ada and SPARK applications. We will explore the details in this blog entry.

From Rust to SPARK: Formally Proven Bip-Buffers

I am following the evolution of the embedded Rust community and in particular the work of James Munns from Ferrous-Systems. One of the projects that caught my attention is bbqueue, a single producer, single consumer, lockless, thread safe queue, based on BipBuffers.

Performance analysis and tuning of SPARKNaCl

This blog goes into the details of both measuring and improving the runtime performance of SPARKNaCl on a real "bare metal" embedded target, and comparing results with those for the original "TweetNaCl" C implementation.

Ada on any ARM Cortex-M device, in just a couple minutes

In this blog post I want to present a new tool that allows one to very quickly and easily start Ada programming on any ARM Cortex-M or RISC-V microcontroller.

Make with Ada 2020: The autonomous firetruck

The AFT (Autonomous FireTruck) is a prototype of an autonomous firetruck that can put out fire without risking people's lives. This project won a finalist prize in the Make with Ada 2019/20 competition.

Ada for micro:bit Part 8: Music to my ears

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Make With Ada 2020: High Integrity Sumobot

Blaine Osepchuk's project won a finalist prize in the Make with Ada 2019/20 competition. This project was originally posted on Hackster.io here. For those interested in participating in the 2020/21 competition, registration is now open and project submissions will be accepted until Jan 31st 2021, register here.

Ada for micro:bit Part 7: Accelerometer

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Ada for micro:bit Part 6: Analog Input

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Ada for micro:bit Part 5: Analog Output

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Ada for micro:bit Part 4: Pin Input

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Ada for micro:bit Part 3: Pin Output

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Ada for micro:bit Part 2: Push buttons

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

Ada for micro:bit Part 1: Getting Started

Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.

GNATcoverage: getting started with instrumentation

This is the second post of a series about GNATcoverage and source code instrumentation. The previous post introduced how GNATcoverage worked originally and why we extended it to support source instrumentation-based code coverage computation. Let’s now see it in action in the most simple case: a basic program running on the host machine, i.e. the Linux/Windows machine that runs GNATcoverage itself.

Introducing source code instrumentation in GNATcoverage

This is the first post of a series about GNATcoverage and source code instrumentation.In order to make GNATcoverage viable in more contexts, we planned several years ago to add instrumentation support in GNATcoverage for Ada sources. This feature reached maturation recently and is available in the last Continuous Release, so it is a good time to present it with a blog series!

Make with Ada 2020: LoRaDa := Ada + LoRa;

Hedley Rainnie's project combines 6 different SoCs all programmed in Ada performing as a LoRa network. He also showcases a BLE bridge to a LoRa server. His project came about when him and his wife were musing about how to detect and deter unwanted garden visitors. This ongoing project won a finalist prize in the 2019/20 Make with Ada competition.

Make with Ada 2020: Disaster Management with Smart Circuit Breaker

Shahariar's project ensures safety against electrical fire or shock during an earthquake, flood, gas leakage or fire breakout by disconnecting the mains with a smart circuit breaker. Additionally, this project won a finalist prize in the 2019/20 Make with Ada competition.

Make with Ada 2020: CryptAda - (Nuclear) Crypto on Embedded Device

Team CryptAda's project collects entropy, manages an entropy pool, implements a homemade PRNG, and generates RSA keys directly on the board with an accent on security. Additionally, this project won a finalist prize in the 2019/20 Make with Ada competition.

CuBit: A General-Purpose Operating System in SPARK/Ada

Last year, I started evaluating programming languages for a formally-verified operating system. I've been developing software for a while, but only recently began work in high integrity software development and formal methods. There are several operating system projects, like the SeL4 microkernel and the Muen separation kernel, that make use of formal verification. But I was interested in using a formally-verified language to write a general-purpose OS - an environment for abstracting the underlying hardware while acting as an arbiter for running the normal applications we're used to.

Ada on the ESP8266

Not long ago, AdaCore published its LLVM frontend for GNAT. Also quite recently Espressif updated their LLVM backend to LLVM 9 which also happens to be the LLVM version of GNAT. This gave me to the idea to try out if LLVMs promise of providing modular and reusable toolchain technologies is true.

Android application with Ada and WebAssembly

Having previously shown how to create a Web application in Ada, it's not so difficult to create an Android application in Ada. Perhaps the simplest way is to install Android Studio. Then just create a new project and choose "Empty Activity". Open the layout, delete TextView and put WebView instead.

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 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.

Witnessing the Emergence of a New Ada Era

For nearly four decades the Ada language (in all versions of the standard) has been helping developers meet the most stringent reliability, safety and security requirements in the embedded market. As such, Ada has become an entrenched player in its historic A&D niche, where its technical advantages are recognized and well understood. Ada has also seen usage in other domains (such as medical and transportation) but its penetration has progressed at a somewhat slower pace. In these other markets Ada stands in particular contrast with the C language, which, although suffering from extremely well known and documented flaws, remains a strong and seldom questioned default choice. Or at least, when it’s not the choice, C is still the starting point (a gateway drug?) for alternatives such as C++ or Java, which in the end still lack the software engineering benefits that Ada embodies..

An Expedition into Libadalang

I’ve been telling Ada developers for a while now that Libadalang will open up the possibility of more-easily writing Ada source code analysis tools.  (You can read more about Libadalang here and here and can also access the project on Github.)

The Make with Ada competition is back!

AdaCore’s fourth annual Make with Ada competition launched this week with over $8K in cash and prizes to be awarded for the most innovative embedded systems projects developed using Ada and/or SPARK.

Using Ada for a Spanish Satellite Project

I am an Associate Professor at Polytechnic University of Madrid’s (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid / UPM) in the Department of Architecture and Technology of Computer Systems. For the past several years I have been directing a team of colleagues and students in the development of a UPMSat-2 microsatellite. The project originally started in 2013 as a follow-to the UPM-SAT 1, launched by an Ariane-4 in 1995.

Bringing Ada To MultiZone

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.

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.

How Do We Use CodePeer at AdaCore

A question that our users sometimes ask us is "do you use CodePeer at AdaCore and if so, how?". The answer is yes! and this blog post will hopefully give you some insights into how we are doing it for our own needs.

Proving Memory Operations - A SPARK Journey

The promise behind the SPARK language is the ability to formally demonstrate properties in your code regardless of the input values that are supplied - as long as those values satisfy specified constraints. As such, this is quite different from static analysis tools such as our CodePeer or the typical offering available for e.g. the C language, which trade completeness for efficiency in the name of pragmatism. Indeed, the problem they’re trying to solve - finding bugs in existing applications - makes it impossible to be complete. Or, if completeness is achieved, then it is at the cost of massive amount of uncertainties (“false alarms”). SPARK takes a different approach. It requires the programmer to stay within the boundaries of a (relatively large) Ada language subset and to annotate the source code with additional information - at the benefit of being able to be complete (or sound) in the verification of certain properties, and without inundating the programmer with false alarms.

It's time to Make with Ada!

The challengeAre you ready to develop a project to the highest levels of safety, security and reliability? If so, Make with Ada is the challenge for you! We’re calling on embedded developers across the globe to build cool embedded applications using the Ada and SPARK programming languages and are offering over $8000 in total prizes. In addition, eligible students will compete for a reward of an Analog Discovery 2 Pro Bundle worth $299.99!

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.

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.

Ada on FPGAs with PicoRV32

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.

AdaCore major sponsor at HIS 2018

We are happy to announce that, AdaCore, alongside Altran and Jaguar Land Rover will be major sponsors of the fifth edition of the renowned High Integrity Software Conference on the 6th November in Bristol!

Learn.adacore.com is here

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.

GNAT Community 2018 is here!

Calling all members of the Ada and SPARK community, we are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2018 is here! adacore.com/download

Taking on a Challenge in SPARK

Last week, the programmer Hillel posted a challenge (the link points to a partial postmortem of the provided solutions) on Twitter for someone to prove a correct implementation of three small programming problems: Leftpad, Unique, and Fulcrum.

SPARKZumo Part 2: Integrating the Arduino Build Environment Into GPS

This is part #2 of the SPARKZumo series of blog posts. This post covers the build system that was used to build the SPARKZumo project and how to automate the process in GPS.

Getting Rid of Rust with Ada

There are a lot of DIY CNC projects out there (router, laser, 3D printer, egg drawing, etc.), but I never saw a DIY CNC sandblaster. So I decided to make my own.

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?

Ada on the micro:bit

Updated July 2018

AdaCore at FOSDEM 2018

Every year, free and open source enthusiasts gather at Brussels (Belgium) for two days of FLOSS-related conferences. FOSDEM organizers setup several “developer rooms”, which are venues that host talks on specific topics. This year, the event will happen on the 3rd and 4th of February (Saturday and Sunday) and there is a room dedicated to the Ada programming language.

Make with Ada 2017- Ada Based IoT Framework

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.

There's a mini-RTOS in my language

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

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

SummaryThe 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.

Make with Ada 2017: Brushless DC Motor Controller

This project involves the design of a software platform that provides a good basis when developing motor controllers for brushless DC motors (BLDC/PMSM). It consist of a basic but clean and readable implementation of a sensored field oriented control algorithm. Included is a logging feature that will simplify development and allows users to visualize what is happening. The project shows that Ada successfully can be used for a bare-metal project that requires fast execution.

The Adaroombot Project

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.

Ada on the first RISC-V microcontroller

Updated July 2018

DIY Coffee Alarm Clock

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 :)

GPS for bare-metal developers

In my previous blog article, I exposed some techniques that helped me rewrite the Crazyflie’s firmware from C into Ada and SPARK 2014, in order to improve its safety.

GNATcoverage moves to GitHub

Following the current trend, the GNATcoverage project moves to GitHub! Our new address is: https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatcoverage

Writing on Air

While searching for motivating projects for students of the Real-Time Systems course here at Universitat Politècnica de València, we found a curious device that produces a fascinating effect. It holds a 12 cm bar from its bottom and makes it swing, like an upside-down pendulum, at a frequency of nearly 9 Hz. The free end of the bar holds a row of eight LEDs. With careful and timely switching of those LEDs, and due to visual persistence, it creates the illusion of text... floating in the air!

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.

Make with Ada: DIY instant camera

There are moments in life where you find yourself with an AdaFruit thermal printer in one hand, and an OpenMV camera in the other.

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.

Driving a 3D Lunar Lander Model with ARM and Ada

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.

GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) on GitHub

The GPS source repository has been published on GitHub. This post briefly describes how you can access it, and hopefully contribute.

Introducing the Make With Ada competition!

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!

Make with Ada: ARM Cortex-M CNC controller

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.

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.

Embedded Product Line Updates

Embedded products are not stand alone, this allows them to have safety, mission critical and real-time requirements that they wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise. The embedded product line provides analyzable, verifiable, and certifiable software for both static and dynamic analysis tools.

QGen 2.1 Release!

Embedded World will see the latest release of QGen, the qualifiable and customisable code generator for Simulink® and Stateflow® models!

ERTS and Embedded World conferences 2016

We are pleased to announce that we will be a major sponsor and exhibitor at ERTS, Toulouse and will be exhibiting at Embedded World, Nuremberg in the coming months!

ARM TechCon and NBAA Conference 2015

We are continuing to develop tools for use within projects that require reliable and secure embedded software for ARM. Our engineering team have been busy creating demos running on ARM technology, such as Tetris in SPARK on ARM Cortex M4.

HIS Conference 2015, Bristol

We are excited to be sponsoring and exhibiting at the 2nd annual High Integrity Software conference, taking place on 5th November 2015 at The Royal Marriott Hotel in Bristol.

Make with Ada : From bits to music

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.

Make with Ada: All that is useless is essential

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 .

A Building Code for Building Code

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.

QGen on Embedded News TV

Embedded News TV caught up with our own Matteo Bordin to talk about QGen. Matteo provides a nice overview of QGen and it's position in the industry as the need for safe and secure software becomes increasingly important.

A Busy Schedule Ahead!

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!

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 2014 Rationale: Data Dependencies

Programs often use a few global variables. Global variables make passing common information between different parts of a program easier. By reading the specification of a subprogram we are able to see all of the parameters that the subprogram uses and, in Ada, we also get to know whether they are read, written or both. However, no information regarding the use of global variables is revealed by reading the specifications. In order to monitor and enforce which global variables a subprogram is allowed to use, SPARK 2014 has introduced the Global aspect, which I describe in this post.

Case Study for System to Software Integrity Includes SPARK 2014

My colleague Matteo Bordin will present at the upcoming Embedded Real Time Software and Systems conference in Toulouse in February a case study showing how formal verification with SPARK can be included in a larger process to show preservation of properties from the system level down to the software level. The case study is based on the Nose Gear challenge from the Workshop on Theorem Proving in Certification.

Rail, Space, Security: Three Case Studies for SPARK 2014

We will present three case studies using SPARK 2014 at the upcoming Embedded Real Time Software and Systems conference in Toulouse in February 2014, in three different domains: rail, space and security. The lessons learned in those three case studies are particularly interesting. Here is the companion paper that we wrote.

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Mixing SPARK and Ada Code

The first step before any formal verification work with SPARK is to delimitate the part of the code that will be subject to formal verification within the overall Ada application. This post presents the solution we've come up with for SPARK 2014.

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Loop Variants

Loop variants are the little-known cousins of the loop invariants, used for proving termination of subprograms. Although they may not look very useful at first, they can prove effective as I show with a simple binary search example. And we came up with both an elegant syntax and a slick refinement for loop variants in SPARK 2014, compared to similar constructs in other languages.

Project Hi-Lite Wrap-up

After three years of hard work, we have reached last week the end of project Hi-Lite, whose goal was to simplify the use of formal methods. We're proud to publicize the results obtained, in particular the new version of SPARK and the associated tool GNATprove. Here's a summary of the wrap-up meeting.