100 entries tagged with #Language
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.
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..
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.
Presenting the GNAT LLVM project At AdaCore labs, we have been working for some time now on combining the GNAT Ada front-end with a different code generator than GCC.
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.
We are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2019 has been released! See https://www.adacore.com/download.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Summary The 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
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.
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.
For those users of the GNAT GPL edition, we are pleased to announce the availability of the 2017 release of GNAT GPL and SPARK GPL.
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.
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.
Judging for the first annual Make with Ada competition has come to an end and we can now reveal the results.
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.
As seen in the previous blog article, AdaCore relies heavily on virtualisation to perform the testing of its GNAT Pro products for VxWorks.
We are pleased to announce that on April 27th our partner, Vector, will host a webinar to showcase their latest VectorCAST/Ada release!
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.
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.
Just a few weeks ago, one of our partners reported a strange behavior of the well-known function Ada.Text_IO.Get_Line, which reads a line of text from an input file. When the last line of the file was of a specific length like 499 or 500 or 1000, and not terminated with a newline character, then Get_Line raised an exception End_Error instead of returning the expected string. That was puzzling for a central piece of code known to have worked for the past 10 years! But fair enough, there was indeed a bug in the interaction between subprograms in this code, in boundary cases having to do with the size of an intermediate buffer. My colleague Ed Schonberg who fixed the code of Get_Line had nonetheless the intuition that this particular event, finding such a bug in an otherwise trusted legacy piece of code, deserved a more in depth investigation to ensure no other bugs were hiding. So he challenged the SPARK team at AdaCore in checking the correctness of the patched version. He did well, as in the process we uncovered 3 more bugs.
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.
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.
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!
The three of us attended the Ada Lovelace Symposium in Oxford (UK). The two days were one fantastic discovery after another about the life, achievements and legacy of Ada Lovelace, the programming pioneer who lent her name to the Ada language.
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.
Project-P Open Workshop
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.
I recently joined AdaCore as a Technical Account Manager with an initial focus on the UK and Scandinavian regions, but for the last 12 months I've been busy working on the AdaCore University. The most recent addition to which is a course on Mixed Language Programming with Ada, and it includes lectures on the integration of Ada with C, C++ and Java. The course covers some advanced topics like mixed language object orientation, techniques for using Ada strong typing to combat known issue with C pointers and the pitfalls that are encountered when mixing native Ada code with Java at runtime. This course clearly demonstrates that Ada has strong support for integration with C, C++ and Java and it proves there are no technical barriers to its adoption in modern mixed language software systems.
20 Years of AdaCore: Company as Committed as Ever on Safety-Critical Software Solutions
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.
