AdaCore Blog

14 entries tagged with #Unbound

Introduction to VSS library

The VSS (as an abbre­vi­a­tion for Vir­tu­al String Sub­sys­tem) library is designed to pro­vide advanced string and text pro­cess­ing capa­bil­i­ties. It offers a con­ve­nient and robust API that allows devel­op­ers to work with Uni­code text, regard­less of its inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion. In this arti­cle, we will intro­duce you to the library and explain its pur­pose, high­light­ing its use­ful­ness for devel­op­ers work­ing in this area.

#Unicode    #strings    #Libraries    #vss   

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.

From Ada to Platinum SPARK: A Case Study for Reusable Bounded Stacks

This blog entry describes the transformation of an Ada stack ADT into a completely proven SPARK implementation that relies on static verification instead of run-time enforcement of the abstraction’s semantics. We will prove that there are no reads of unassigned variables, no array indexing errors, no range errors, no numeric overflow errors, no attempts to push onto a full stack, no attempts to pop from an empty stack, that subprogram bodies implement their functional requirements, and so on. As a result, we get a maximally robust implementation of a reusable stack abstraction providing all the facilities required for production use.

#SPARK    #Ada    #Transitioning to SPARK   

Proving a simple program doing I/O ... with SPARK

The functionality of many security-critical programs is directly related to Input/Output (I/O). This includes command-line utilities such as gzip, which might process untrusted data downloaded from the internet, but also any servers that are directly connected to the internet, such as webservers, DNS servers and so on. In this blog post we show an approach that deals with error handling and reasoning about content, and demonstrate the approach using the cat command line utility.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

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.

#Testing    #Ada    #VerificationTools   

SPARKSMT - An SMTLIB Processing Tool Written in SPARK - Part I

Today I will write the first article in a short series about the development of an SMTLIB processing tool in SPARK. Instead of focusing on features, I intend to focus on the how I have proved absence of run-time errors in the name table and lexer. I had two objectives: show absence of run-time errors, and do not write useless defensive code. Today's blog will be about the name table, a data structure found in many compilers that can map strings to a unique integer and back. The next blog post will talk about the lexical analyzer.

#Dev Projects    #Formal Verification    #SPARK