Ada Resource Association

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.”

CodePeer is an advanced static analysis tool helps developers detect potential run-time and logic errors in Ada programs. CodePeer 2.2 brings users an extra level of flexibility through interfaces to Eclipse, spreadsheets, full HTML capabilities, as well as solutions for the full range of Ada projects, including those with requirements for the highest levels of integrity and certification, and systems with large and complex code bases.

GNAT Pro 7.1 is a major new version of the company’s flagship development environment that brings a combination of advantages: extreme stability for existing users, support for an increasingly wider range of platforms and targets, significant performance enhancements, and a wealth of new capabilities and features. The most striking new feature, support for automatic data endianness conversion, is already a customer favorite.

TOYOTA InfoTechnology Center Japan has selected the SPARK language and SPARK Pro toolset for a high-reliability software research project. The goal of the project is to show that software requirements can be transformed into an implementation that can be proven to be free of run-time errors. This will have the key advantage of providing ultra-low-defect software for higher reliability in a vehicle component.

AdaCore today announced the availability of its GNAT Pro Safety-Critical product for ARM Cortex micro-controllers. This bareboard GNAT Pro Safety-Critical product provides a complete Ada development environment, oriented towards systems that are safety-critical or have stringent memory constraints. Developers of such systems can now exploit the software engineering benefits of the Ada language, including reliability, maintainability, and portability.

Calling all fellow software engineers (Ada geeks)! On this Valentine’s Day, AdaCore invites you to open your hearts and help share the passion for all things Ada! As so many developers know, relationships with programming languages can be a lot like romances: First there are wild infatuations and brief honeymoons filled with eager expectations. Then come realities, incompatibilities, even loveless cohabitation. So, what’s next? A remorseful search for a new relationship, or reconciliation and renewed passion? Thanks to the new ISO-approved Ada 2012 standard, our ardor for Ada is now stronger than ever! Come join the conversation: Let us know why and how you use Ada, and what you love about it. Visit www.ada2012.org/passion.html and share your own ‘passion’ for Ada! Also, check us out on facebook at facebook.com/adapassion.

A new GNAT Pro feature allows Ada developers to portably and reliably define data layout in an endianness-independent fashion. This capability makes it possible to port and reuse existing code bases on a different hardware platform, without having to manually implement the error-prone, byte-swapping logic that would otherwise be needed.

Rockwell Collins has successfully used AdaCore’s Code Traceability Analysis for DO-178B in the certification of the Integrated Display System (IDS) for a large, next-generation, commercial aircraft. The Traceability Analysis package is part of the evidence needed to satisfy the DO-178B objectives for structural code coverage at Level A, the highest (most stringent) level for avionics software safety.

The SPARK Pro 11 software development and verification environment has been released, providing a major step forward for the developers of high-assurance systems. SPARK Pro 11 offers many enhancements particularly in the area of program proof.