Ada Resource Association

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.

Australian healthcare informatics company SmartWard Pty Ltd has adopted AdaCore’s GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment and CodePeer static analysis tool to implement their patient care management system. This system needs to be highly reliable and secure from unauthorized users while providing real-time response in an easy to use format. AdaCore’s tools were determined to be the best solution for meeting these requirements.

AdaCore has a long history of providing Ada-based software development tools for a wide range of safety-critical systems, and now provides a competitive advantage for medical applications such as SmartWard where the concept of a ‘fatal error’ may be literally true.