Reducing Ada code bases with adareducer
How we're using Libadalang to create an automated Ada code reducer.
20 entries tagged with #libadalang
How we're using Libadalang to create an automated Ada code reducer.
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.
Today we have two exciting announcements for the future of the Ada/SPARK ecosystem.
We are happy to announce that the GNAT Community 2021 release is now available via https://www.adacore.com/download. Here are some release highlights:
A code obfuscator is a method of sharing coding discussions of real-world examples without giving away proprietary or classified information. This article shows an example of an Ada obfuscator, written in the SPARK language and using the Libadalang library to intelligently hide names and text within the source.
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.
Martyn’s recent blog post showed small programs based on Libadalang to find uses of access types in Ada sources. Albeit short, these programs need to take care of all the tedious logistics around processing Ada sources: find the files to work on, create a Libadalang analysis context, use it to read the source files, etc. Besides, they are not very convenient to run:
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.)
Part of our core expertise at AdaCore is to integrate multiple technologies as smoothly as possible and make it a product. This started at the very beginning of our company by integrating a code generator (GCC) with an Ada front-end (GNAT) which was then followed by integrating a debugger engine (GDB) and led to today's rich GNAT Pro offering.
We are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2019 has been released! See https://www.adacore.com/download.
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.
One of the most criticized aspect of the Ada language throughout the years has been its outdated syntax. Fortunately, AdaCore decided to tackle this issue by implementing a new, modern, syntax for Ada.
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.
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.
Libadalang has come a long way since the last time we blogged about it. In the past 6 months, we have been working tirelessly on name resolution, a pretty complicated topic in Ada, and it is finally ready enough that we feel ready to blog about it, and encourage people to try it out.
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.
We reported in a previous post our initial experiments to create lightweight checkers for Ada source code, based on the new Libadalang technology. The two checkers we described discovered 12 issues in the codebase of the tools we develop at AdaCore. In this post, we are reporting on 6 more lightweight checkers, which have discovered 114 new issues in our codebase. This is definitely showing that these kind of checkers are worth integrating in static analysis tools, and we look forward to integrating these and more in our static analyzer CodePeer for Ada programs.
After we created lightweight checkers based on the recent Libadalang technology developed at AdaCore, a colleague gave us the challenge of creating a copy-paste detector based on Libadalang. It turned out to be both easier than anticipated, and much more efficient and effective than we could have hoped for. In the end, we hope to use this new detector to refactor the codebase of some of our tools, and we expect to integrate it in our IDEs.
At AdaCore, we have a strong expertise in deep static analysis tools (CodePeer and SPARK), and we have been relying on the compiler GNAT and our coding standard checker GNATcheck to deal with more syntactic or weakly-semantic checks. The recent Libadalang technology, developed at AdaCore, provided us with an ideal basis to develop specialized light-weight static analyzers. As an experiment, we implemented two simple checkers using the Python binding of Libadalang. The results on our own codebase were eye-opening: we found a dozen bugs in the codebases of the tools we develop at AdaCore (including the compiler and static analyzers).
AdaCore is working on a host of tools that works on Ada code. The compiler, GNAT, is the most famous and prominent one, but it is far from being the only one. At AdaCore, we already have several other tools to process Ada code: the ASIS library, GNAT2XML, the GPS IDE. A realization of the past years, however, has been that we were lacking a unified solution to process code that is potentially evolving, potentially incorrect Ada code. Hence Libadalang.