Ada Resource Association

AdaCore has published a 70-page booklet authored by AdaCore expert Quentin Ochem and CERTIFIER safety assessor Jean-Louis Boulanger; it summarizes CENELEC EN 50128:2011 railway software standard and explains how the Ada programming language and AdaCore’s products can be used to meet its requirements throughout the software life cycle. The report can be downloaded from http://adacore.com/en-50128.

Today, AdaCore launched the “Make with Ada” programming competition, a contest that aims to help the embedded software community improve the quality of their code by encouraging the use of the Ada and SPARK programming languages. The competition will run from June 20 to September 30, 2016 and offers over €8000 in total prizes.

AdaCore has released a new version of its flagship GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment. GNAT Pro 7.4 incorporates new functionality, a number of performance improvements, additional platform support including several new embedded targets, and many other enhancements.

AdaCore has released a new version of its model-based development and verification toolset, QGen. QGen provides a qualifiable and customizable code generator from Simulink® and Stateflow® models to the safety-oriented programming languages SPARK (a formally analyzable Ada subset) and MISRA C. QGen 2.1 supports essentially all constructs used for modeling safety-critical control systems.

AdaCore today announced the latest release of its SPARK Pro integrated development and verification environment, bringing a sound and mathematics-based static analysis technology to the challenges of software verification for high-assurance systems. SPARK Pro 16 provides enhanced coverage of SPARK 2014 language features and now supports the Ravenscar tasking profile, thus extending the benefits of formal verification methods to a safe subset of Ada 2012 concurrent programming features. As another improvement SPARK Pro 16 can generate counterexamples to verification conditions that cannot be proved, thus making it easier for developers to find defects in the functional code or in the supplied contracts. SPARK Pro 16 also improves the handling of bitwise (modular) operations, and the product’s proof engine now includes the Z3 SMT solver.

The Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA) – the French government agency that oversees military procurements – has selected AdaCore and SQUORING Technologies to provide a graphical tool, AdaSquore, for military and civil avionics software audits. Featuring a smart dashboard that monitors the quality metrics of critical components, AdaSquore will facilitate the analysis of existing and new code in Ada and SPARK.

AdaCore’ss CodePeer static analysis tool has been adopted by Atlantic Inertial Systems Limited for usage on its digital terrain system for military transport aircraft. CodePeer CodePeer will automate parts of the DO 178B verification process of the terrain referenced navigation software.

AdaCore today released a freely downloadable version of its GNAT GPL Ada cross-development environment for the Raspberry Pi 2 micro-PC running Embedded Linux. With this new cross-development environment, everyone can take advantage of Ada 2012’s reliability, safety and security benefits for their Raspberry Pi 2 applications.

AdaCore’s GNAT Pro is now available for Wind River VxWorks 7. AdaCore engineers worked closely with Wind River on this new product, ensuring that it would support both single- and multi-core systems, as well as other architectures. Enhancements over previous versions include a completely reengineered open source debugger protocol and more seamless integration with Wind River Workbench, and the development environment handles both all-Ada and multi-language applications.

Robert K. B. Dewar passed away on June 30th, 2015, succumbing to cancer. Dr. Dewar was involved in Ada from early days; he was one of the primary architects of Ada/Ed and later GNAT, he was a co-founder of AdaCore, and he remained active in language standardization activities until his death. For his many other accomplishments, see the AdaCore press release that is linked.