Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++?

At AdaCore, we’re in the business of supporting people who develop high-integrity software, in particular for embedded systems. In terms of programming languages, this means supporting the most commonly found candidates, which in 2024 include C/C++, Ada/SPARK, and Rust. If you’ve already made your decision, we will support you. However, in a number of situations, people ask us: “What should we do? What’s the best out there?”. While it’s difficult to give a one-size-fits-all answer, there are some strategic elements to consider.

Ada GameDev Part 3: Enjoy Video Games Programming with Raylib

In April 2024 a streamer named Tsoding developed a video game from start to finish in Ada in 20 days. He seemed to have enjoyed the experience, to the point where he says that Ada will be the next trendy programming language for game development. Ignoring the potential irony in the streamer’s comment, I thought let’s give Ada gamedev a little push in that direction.

Creating Your Own Ada/SPARK Coding Standard

Many of our customers ask if we have a "Coding Standard" that we can provide for writing code in Ada or SPARK. The answer has typically been: "We provide GNATcheck, which you can use to create your own." While this provides a lot of flexibility and control to the end user, sometimes a developer just wants to get things up and running as quickly as possible, and a generic coding standard is all that's needed. That's why AdaCore decided to help by creating a baseline coding standard that you can use as-is, or modify to fit your needs.

Ada Programming like it's 1985

A few days ago, someone posted a request for the Abacus Commodore 64 Ada compiler on the reddit Ada channel. After a quick look at the manual I decided to give it a try using a C64 emulator. How hard can it be?

Memory Safety in Ada and SPARK through Language Features and Tool Support

This blog post describes how Ada and SPARK provide memory safety through a combination of language features, run-time checks, and static and dynamic analysis tools.

A little bit of Photoshop® using GNAT for CUDA®

Today I want to go over some internal mechanisms of a Photoshop-like application to better illustrate an up-and-coming tech, GNAT for CUDA®, developed at AdaCore.

Extending Priority Inheritance Beyond Protected Operations

This blog entry shows how to define protected types that extend the language-defined priority inheritance for protected actions to the statements outside those protected actions. We create a mutex type for illustration.

Reducing Ada code bases with adareducer

How we're using Libadalang to create an automated Ada code reducer.

New Learn Course: Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming

A new online Learn course has been published offering an Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming.

Fuzzing Out Bugs in Safety-Critical Embedded Software

Fuzzing Out Bugs in Safety-Critical Embedded Software: Paul Butcher from AdaCore talks to Brandon Lewis from Embedded Toolbox

Announcing Updates to learn.adacore.com

Ada Crate of the Year: Interactive code search

A retrospective on learning Ada and developing a tool with it in 2021 from 2021 Ada Crate of the Year Winner Paul Jarrett.

On the Benefits of Families ... (Entry Families)

Ada has a concurrency construct known as “entry families” that, in some cases, is just what we need to express a concise, clear solution.

The FACE™ open systems strategy gaining traction in the avionics industry

The FACE™ approach is a government-industry initiative for reducing defense system life cycle costs through portable and reusable software components. It consists of a technical approach — a software standard based on well-defined common interfaces — and a business strategy for encouraging the development and deployment of FACE conformant products.

Make with Ada 2020: The SmartBase - IoT Adjustable Bed

John Singleton's The SmartBase makes your existing adjustable bed safer and easier to use by adding voice control and safe (and fun!) LED underbed lighting! Additionally, this project won first place prize in the 2019/20 Make with Ada competition.

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.

First Ada Virtual Conference organized by and for the Ada community

The Ada Community has gathered recently around a new exciting initiative - an Ada Virtual Conference, to present Ada-related topics in a 100% remote event. The first such conference took place on August, 10th 2019, around the topic of the new features in Ada 202x. Here is what was presented.

RFCs for Ada and SPARK evolution now on GitHub

Interested in participating in the evolution of the Ada or SPARK languages? We have something for you.

Bringing Ada To MultiZone

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.

Winning DTU RoboCup with Ada and SPARK

The Danish Technical University has a yearly RoboCup where autonomous vehicles solve a number of challenges. We participated with RoadRunner, a 3D printed robot with wheel suspension, based on the BeagleBone Blue ARM-based board and the Pixy 1 camera with custom firmware enabling real-time line detection. Code is written in Ada and formally proved correct with SPARK at Silver level.

AdaCore at FOSDEM 2019

Like last year, we've sent a squad of AdaCore engineers to participate in the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. Like last year, we had great interactions with the rest of the Ada and SPARK Community in the Ada devroom on Saturday. That's what we have to say about it.

Ada on FPGAs with PicoRV32

When I bought the TinyFPGA-BX board, I thought it would be an opportunity to play a little bit with FPGA, learn some Verilog or VHDL. But when I discovered that it was possible to have a RISC-V CPU on it, I knew I had to run Ada code on it.

Learn.adacore.com is here

We are very proud to announce the availability of our new Ada and SPARK learning platform learn.adacore.com, which will replace AdaCoreU(niversity) e-learning platform. Learn all about it in this blog post.

How Ada and SPARK Can Increase the Security of Your Software

There is a long-standing debate about which phase in the Software Development Life Cycle causes the most bugs: is it the specification phase or the coding phase? A recent study by NIST shows that, in the software industry at large, coding bugs are causing the majority of security issues. Choosing a safer language like Ada or SPARK is a critical component for reducing these vulnerabilities that result from simple mistakes. In a new freely available booklet, we explain how these languages and the associated toolsets can be used to increase the security of software.

Ada on the micro:bit

Updated July 2018

Bitcoin blockchain in Ada: Lady Ada meets Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin is getting a lot of press recently, but let's be honest, that's mostly because a single bitcoin worth 800 USD in January 2017 was worth almost 20,000 USD in December 2017. However, bitcoin and its underlying blockchain are beautiful technologies that are worth a closer look. Let’s take that look with our Ada hat on!

Cross-referencing Ada with Libadalang

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.

Make with Ada 2017- Ada Based IoT Framework

SummaryThe 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.

Welcoming New Members to the GNAT Pro Family

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.

There's a mini-RTOS in my language

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

Highlighting Ada with Libadalang

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.

The Adaroombot Project

The Adaroombot project consists of an iRobot CreateⓇ 2 and Ada running on a Raspberry Pi with a Linux OS. This is a great Intro-to-Ada project as it focuses on a control algorithm and a simple serial communications protocol. The iRobot CreateⓇ 2 platform was originally design for STEM education and has great documentation and support - making it very easy to create a control application using Ada. This blog looks at the creation of the project and some cool features of Ada that were learned along the way.

Ada on the first RISC-V microcontroller

Updated July 2018

DIY Coffee Alarm Clock

A few weeks ago one of my colleagues shared this kickstarter project : The Barisieur. It’s an alarm clock coffee maker, promising to wake you up with a freshly brewed cup of coffee every morning. I jokingly said “just give me an espresso machine and I can do the same”. Soon after, the coffee machine is in my office. Now it is time to deliver :)

User-friendly strings API

User friendly strings APIIn 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.

New strings package in GNATCOLL

This post describes the new GNATCOLL.Strings package, and the various optimizations it performs to provide improved performance.

Getting started with the Ada Drivers Library device drivers

The Ada Drivers Library (ADL) is a collection of Ada device drivers and examples for ARM-based embedded targets. The library is maintained by AdaCore, with development originally (and predominantly) by AdaCore personnel but also by the Ada community at large.  It is available on GitHub and is licensed for both proprietary and non-proprietary use.

Introducing Libadalang

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.

Make with Ada: DIY instant camera

There are moments in life where you find yourself with an AdaFruit thermal printer in one hand, and an OpenMV camera in the other.

Driving a 3D Lunar Lander Model with ARM and Ada

One of the interesting aspects of developing software for a bare-board target is that displaying complex application-created information typically requires more than the target board can handle. Although some boards do have amazing graphics capabilities, in some cases you need to have the application on the target interact with applications on the host. This can be due to the existence of special applications that run only (or already) on the host, in particular.

Unity & Ada

Using Ada technologies to develop video games doesn’t sound like an an obvious choice - although it seems like there could be an argument to be made. The reverse, however, opens some more straightforward perspectives.

Introducing the Make With Ada competition!

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!

C library bindings: GCC plugins to the rescue

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!

Make with Ada: ARM Cortex-M CNC controller

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.

CubeSat continues to orbit the Earth thanks to Ada & SPARK!

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.

Calling inherited subprograms in Ada

This short post describes an idiom that can be used to help maintain complex hierarchies of tagged types, when methods need to call the parent types methods.

Modernizing Adacore's Open-Source Involvement

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.

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.

Make with Ada : From bits to music

I started out as an electronic musician, so one of my original motivations when I learnt programming was so that I could eventually *program* the sounds I wanted rather than just use already existing software to do it.

Make with Ada: All that is useless is essential

A few weeks ago I discovered the wonderful world of solenoid engines. The idea is simple: take a piston engine and replace explosion with electromagnetic field. In this article I will experiment a solenoid engine using a hacked hard drive and a software controller on a STM32F4 .

Count them all (reference counting)

Reference countingReference counting is a way to automatically reclaim unused memory. An element is automatically deallocated as soon as there are no more references to it in the program.

Larger than it looks (storage pools)

This post shows how to implement a special storage pool that allocates an extra header every time it allocates some memory. This can be used to store type specific information, outside of the type itself.

The Year for #AdaLove

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.

A Building Code for Building Code

In a recent article in Communications of the ACM, Carl Landwehr, a renowned scientific expert on security, defends the view that the software engineering community is doing overall a poor job at securing our global information system and that this is mostly avoidable by putting what we know works to work, to the point that most vulnerabilities could be completely avoided by design if we cared enough. Shocking! Or so it should appear.

AdaCore Releases GNAT Pro 7.3, QGen 1.0 and GNATdashboard 1.0

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.

A Busy Schedule Ahead!

If you have a passion for Ada, need more information on our technology or would just like to have a chat, there are a couple of upcoming events where we'd love to meet up. What's more, we'll be launching our brand new product QGen at Embedded World!