by Yannick Moy, Nicolas Setton, Ben Brosgol

A Readable Introduction to Both MISRA C and SPARK Ada

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.

by Felix Krause

The Road to a Thick OpenGL Binding for Ada: Part 2

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.

by Yannick Moy, Martin Becker, Emanuel Regnath

Physical Units Pass the Generic Test

The support for physical units in programming languages is a long-standing issue, which very few languages have even attempted to solve. This issue has been mostly solved for Ada in 2012 by our colleagues Ed Schonberg and Vincent Pucci who introduced special aspects for specifying physical dimensions on types. This dimension system did not attempt to deal with generics though. As was noted by others, handling generics in a dimensional analysis that is, like in GNAT, a compile-time analysis with no impact on the executable size or running time, is the source of the problem of dimension handling. Together with our partners from Technical Universitat München, we have finally solved this remaining difficulty.

by Emmanuel Briot

Bookmarks in the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS)

As we improve existing views in GPS, we discover new ways to use them. This post shows some of the improvements done recently in the Bookmarks view, and how you can now use it as a TODO list.

by Emmanuel Briot

Traits-Based Containers

This post describes the design of a new containers library. It highlights some of the limitations of the standard Ada containers, and proposes a new approach using generic packages as formal parameters to make these new containers highly configurable at compile time.

by Martyn Pike

The latest Mixed Programming with Ada lectures at the AdaCore University

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.

#Mixed Language #AdaCore University #Java #C++ #C

by Johannes Kanig

SPARK 15: Errors, Warnings and Checks

The messages issued by the SPARK toolset will change a bit in the next version of both SPARK Pro and SPARK GPL. This post explains the change and the motivation behind it.

by Yannick Moy

Studies of Contracts in Practice

Two recent research papers focus on how program contracts are used in practice in open source projects, in three languages that support contracts (Eiffel obviously, Java with JML contracts and C# with Code Contracts). I'm reporting what I found interesting (and less so) in these two studies.

by Yannick Moy

MISRA-C 2012 vs SPARK 2014, the Subset Matching Game

The MISRA C subset of C defines around 150 rules that restrict C programs for critical software development. Of these, 27 rules are classified as undecidable, which means that few MISRA C checkers (if any) will help checking those hardest rules. Here is how SPARK 2014 can help checking similar rules in Ada programs.