Ada Resource Association

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.

AdaCore today released CodePeer 3.0, a major new version of its advanced static analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code. CodePeer 3.0 includes a variety of enhancements that help developers detect potential run-time and logic errors early in the software life cycle, and its deep analysis can directly support formal certification against industry-specific safety standards.

AdaCore has released QGen, a qualifiable and customizable code generator and model verifier for Simulink and Stateflow models. This tool can generate MISRA C and SPARK source code.

AdaCore has released GNAT Pro 7.3, the latest version of the company’s flagship Ada Development Environment. GNAT Pro 7.3 incorporates performance improvements, new functionality, and many other enhancements.

The Muen Kernel enforces a strict and robust isolation of components to shield security-critical functions from vulnerable software running on the same physical system. To achieve the necessary level of trustworthiness, the Muen team used the SPARK language and toolset to formally prove the absence of run-time errors. The most recent version of the Kernel upgrades the software to use the SPARK 2014 language, which allows the team to use more of the Ada language and provide the annotations in a more readable form.

AdaCore has launched a blog to provide an insight into the AdaCore ecosystem. The blog will cover both technical and less-technical topics (such as the business of Open Source software). The blog can be found at blog.adacore.com.

AdaCore today announced the preview release of GNATdashboard, a new tool that serves as a control panel for monitoring and improving the quality of Ada software. GNATdashboard feeds code quality information from AdaCore’s tools to the open source SonarQube code quality management platform and Squoring Technologies’ SQUORE quality and performance decision support solution.

“For the first time, a tool focused on software quality assessment and management is available for Ada developers. It’s designed to help users understand their technical debt – which is essentially the price one pays for choices such as design decisions that make it difficult to implement changes later.”

AdaCore’s GNAT Pro cross-development environment has been selected by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid / UPM), for the UPMSat-2 UNION satellite project’s real-time on-board and ground control software. The 50kg micro-satellite, scheduled to be launched in Q4 2015, will provide a technology demonstration platform for the university from a sun-synchronous orbit nearly 600 km above Earth.

AdaCore’s CodePeer advanced static analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code has been qualified as a software verification tool for developers in both avionics and railway industries.

AdaCore has released a freely downloadable version of its GNAT GPL Ada cross-development environment for Bare Board ARM Cortex processors. Developers of non-proprietary software can now exploit Ada 2012’s reliability, safety and security benefits for ARM applications.

GNAT GPL for Bare Board ARM Cortex processors provides a complete Ada 2012 development environment, including a comprehensive tool-chain and GPS, AdaCore’s flagship Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It also includes a fully configurable/customizable run-time library consisting of the “Small Footprint” (SFP) and Ravenscar profiles that are particularly relevant to safety-critical systems. The SFP profile corresponds to a language subset with minimal GNAT run-time routines, and the Ravenscar profile is a subset of the Ada concurrency features with an efficient, predictable, small-footprint implementation. The resulting Ada subset has expressive power well beyond that of other languages used for ARM-based devices.