Ada Resource Association

AdaCore today announced the next major release of its Ada development environment, GNAT Pro 7.2. This latest GNAT Pro toolsuite incorporates more than 120 new features, many of which are based on customer suggestions. This latest GNAT Pro toolsuite includes several new tools, is available on additional platforms, implements the Ada 2012 language standard by default, and extends its coverage of ARM configurations.

CodePeer 2.3 is the latest version of AdaCore’s static analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code. CodePeer assesses potential bugs before program execution to find errors efficiently and early in the development life cycle. It also performs impact and vulnerability analysis when existing code is modified, and, using control-flow, data-flow and other advanced static analysis techniques, the tool detects problems that would otherwise only be found through labor-intensive debugging.

GNATcoverage 1.2 is the latest version of AdaCore’s source and object code coverage analysis tool. GNATcoverage does not require instrumentation of the executable, and this new product release supports usage with an iSystem hardware probe generating Nexus trace data, as well as usage with Valgrind on Linux.

AdaCore today announced the adoption of its GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment by Deep Blue Capital (DBC), a propriety trading firm. DBC rotates teams through the world time zones at their Amsterdam-based offices to trade twenty-four hours a day, 7 days a week on all of the world’s major stock exchanges. DBC employs algorithmic trading systems developed in Ada with AdaCore’s GNAT Pro development environment; these systems gather market information and automatically send buy and sell orders with minimal human intervention. DBC, a small company with fewer than twenty employees, can operate globally because of its efficient and reliable software.

The Institute for Internet Technologies and Applications at the University of Applied Science in Rapperswil (Switzerland) and AdaCore today announced a significant expansion of the Open Source software model into the domain of high-assurance systems with the preview release of the Muen Separation Kernel. 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.

NEW YORK, PARIS, & BATH, United Kingdom–Today, AdaCore and Altran announced a new space application for the GNAT Pro technology and SPARK language toolset, with the successful launch of Vermont Technical College’s Lunar CubeSat. The tiny satellite, measuring only 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm and weighing 1.1 kg, was launched into a 500 km earth orbit, where it will remain for about three years to test the systems that will be used for the eventual lunar mission. The CubeSat project is part of NASA’s ELaNa IV program (Educational Launch of Nano-satellites).

The CubeSat’s navigation and control software was developed in SPARK/Ada using AdaCore’s GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) IDE and GNAT Pro compiler and exploiting Altran’s SPARK toolset to prove the absence of run-time errors. The software was developed at Vermont Technical College by a team of undergraduate students under the direction of Dr. Peter Chapin. Although they had no previous knowledge of SPARK or Ada, the students came up to speed quickly and were able to take advantage of SPARK’s various annotations to produce robust code.

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PITTSBURGH, Pa., NEW YORK and PARIS, November 12, 2013 – ACM SIGAda HILT Conference – AdaCore today announced the release of the GPS 6.0 graphical Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a major upgrade with a significantly revised and cleaner user interface that eases program navigation and editing. With this new version of the GNAT Programming Studio, developers can take advantage of more space for editing and a number of design changes that bring program-related information within easy reach. The revised look and feel is supported by a new relational database at the heart of the GPS engine, making code navigation much more efficient. The principles underlying the GPS 6.0 revision help the IDE achieve its main goal: to serve as a customizable platform for multi-language, multi-tool integration, usable by developers at all experience levels.

AdaCore has launched a new, free, web-based resource center called AdaCore University at university.adacore.com. The new website offers pre-recorded courses and other learning materials for anyone interested in learning about, or how to program in, the Ada programming language.

The GNAT Pro Ada development environment is now available for the Wind River Linux platform. This new implementation brings the Ada language’s reliability benefits to the increasingly popular Wind River Linux system. AdaCore offers the industry’s leading Ada solution for Wind River’s products, including a GNAT Pro implementation for Wind River’s VxWorks® real-time operating system (RTOS).

AdaCore and its research partners today announced the successful completion of Project Hi-Lite, a three-year, €3.9 million effort aimed at popularizing formal methods in the development of high integrity software by combining formal verification and testing. Hi-Lite took advantage of Airbus’ decade-long experience using formal verification methods to create high integrity systems, and leveraged the powerful industrial tools already developed by the project partners. The work was sponsored by the French Government and the General Council of the Département of Essonne and was conducted by a partnership comprising AdaCore, Altran, Astrium Space Transportation, CEA List, INRIA Toccata and Thales Communications. Hi-Lite’s main goal was to make formal verification faster and easier to use across large, multi-language projects that need to meet safety certification criteria, and the project has successfully achieved this objective. “Hi-Lite has allowed us to take advanced program proving technology that was developed in academia and adapt it for industrial use,” said Yannick Moy, Hi-Lite Project Manager at AdaCore. “The project has shown that formal verification can complement testing and play a prominent and practical role in verifying critical software.”