Ada Resource Association

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., November 12, 2013 – Today at ACM SIGAda’s HILT 2013 (High Integrity Language Technology) Conference, the Ada Resource Association (ARA) and Ada-Europe announced the publication of the Ada 2012 Rationale and its free availability for downloading. Sponsored in part by Ada-Europe, the Ada Resource Association, and AdaCore, the Ada 2012 Rationale was written by longtime Ada authority John Barnes. It summarizes the new Ada 2012 features, shows examples of their use, describes compatibility with earlier versions of the language standard, and explains the reasons behind critical language design decisions. This new Rationale will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning the innovations introduced by the Ada 2012 standard.

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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.”

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.