9 entries tagged with #Legacy
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.
From time to time we see, here and there, discussions in the Ada community about the design and adoption of a common logo to represent the language. Today we want to bring our contribution to this discussion by offering a logo to the Ada community.
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.
We are happy to announce that the GNAT Community 2020 release is now available! Read the post for access to download and to find out about this year's release highlights.
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.
AdaCore has been working with CEA, Inria and NIST to organize a two-days event dedicated to sound static analysis techniques and tools, and how they are used to increase the security of software-based systems. The program gathers top-notch experts in the field, from industry, government agencies and research institutes, around the three themes of analysis of legacy code, use in new developments and accountable software quality. Here is why it is worth attending.
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.
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.
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.