A Fresh Take on DO-178C Software Reviews
The software review is an essential part of the evidence required for certification according to DO-178C. In this blog post we reflect on the objectives and challenges regarding DO-178C compliance.
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Fabien Chouteau
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Ada Programming like it's 1985
A few days ago, someone posted a request for the Abacus Commodore 64 Ada compiler on the reddit Ada channel. After a quick look at the manual I decided to give it a try using a C64 emulator. How hard can it be?
AdaCore Contribution to Reducing GHG Emissions
Like any other company, AdaCore contributes to climate change through its activities. We recognize that it is our responsibility to reduce this negative impact, and we've been on a path to make measurable concrete progress in the reduction of our GHG emissions since 2019. In this post, we are describing our current progress and plans forward.
International Women’s Day: My Career Journey
Every 8th March, International Women’s Day is celebrated around the world - it’s a great opportunity to highlight women’s talents, their achievements, and what makes them great at what they do.This year’s theme is #InspireInclusion. At AdaCore, this got us thinking about what our team values the most and how we strive to create a sense of belonging and community, no matter who our people are, their level of seniority, or where they’re based.Viviane Garese and Sofia Casale reveal more about their career journeys, their accomplishments in Software Engineering and Sales, and how AdaCore’s core value of collaboration helps to inspire inclusion at work every day.
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Fabien Chouteau
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BACK TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS: AdaCore’s Contributions to Secure and Measurable Software
The focus on enhancing cybersecurity through various technological approaches and methodologies, as detailed in the White House Office of the National Cyber Director’s (ONCD) document titled “Back to the Building Blocks: A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software" underscores a pivotal shift in how organizations, especially those at the helm of technological innovation, must adapt and respond to the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats. This document provides an overview of some strategies and technologies that are critical in bolstering cybersecurity defenses.
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Anthony Aiello
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Co-Developing Programs and Their Proof of Correctness
I am delighted to announce that the Communications of the ACM has published a paper on SPARK: “Co-Developing Programs and Their Proof of Correctness”. The paper provides a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of SPARK; as such, it’s a great reference to share with anyone - in industry, academia, or anywhere in between - who might like to know more about SPARK.
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Maxim Reznik
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Enhancing Ada Embedded Development: The Power of Real-Time Logging with RTT
Efficient embedded development in Ada relies on powerful tools. Real-time logging plays a pivotal role, enabling live monitoring and analysis. Unlike traditional methods, SEGGER's Real-Time Transfer (RTT) method offers hardware-independent real-time logging with low latency.This article explores RTT's simplicity: storing protocol data in a ring buffer on the target device, read by the debugger without halting program execution. The provided Ada code showcases RTT's implementation, from buffer types to control blocks.Integration with development environments is seamless, as seen with the Cortex Debug extension for VS Code. The extension supports RTT, providing features like textual and graphical display of RTT stream data.In summary, SEGGER's RTT method is a powerful, hardware-independent solution for real-time logging in Ada development. Its efficiency and flexibility make it indispensable for debugging, error detection, and security in embedded systems. Explore the GitHub repository for a hands-on experience with RTT in Ada embedded development.
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Nicolas Venner
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DNSSEC and DMARC Compliance at AdaCore
While foundational to the internet, the traditional DNS system has its vulnerabilities. Threats such as DNS spoofing and cache poisoning pose significant risks to the integrity and authenticity of DNS data. DNSSEC is designed to address this risk.
GNAT Static Analysis Suite: A Vision for Static Analysis in Ada
You may have noticed that over the past two years, we have made significant updates to our CodePeer product - the most visible change being the renaming of the product itself, now branded as “GNAT Static Analysis Suite”. For those who are already using the product and are looking to use the new version, it may be a good time to step back and share our vision, at AdaCore, for static analysis.
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Fabien Chouteau
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Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year 2023 Winners Announced!
In 2023 we announced the third edition of the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. We see the Alire source package manager as a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use the Crate of the Year awards to honor the people contributing to the ecosystem. This edition was different from the previous ones: we decided to depart from a submissions-based approach and instead consider all crates available in the Alire ecosystem. Today we are pleased to announce the results.
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Ben Brosgol
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Memory Safety in Rust
Informally, memory safety in a program means that each data access is well behaved; i.e., is consistent with the item’s data type, does not impinge on any storage locations beyond the data value’s boundaries, and, if the program is multithreaded, does not produce an inconsistent or corrupted value. Memory safety violations result in undefined behavior, which is a Bad Thing: instances like the notorious “buffer overrun” can turn an otherwise safe and secure program into a ticking virtual time bomb. Some of the most eventful malware attacks in recent years are due to memory safety violations, and the topic has moved from techno-geek subreddits into mainstream discourse. Anyone developing or acquiring software, especially for applications with high assurance requirements, needs to pay attention.
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Fabien Chouteau
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AdaCore Enhances GCC Security with Innovative Features
In a significant stride towards bolstering the security of the open-source ecosystem, AdaCore has recently contributed a set of security hardening features to the GCC project (GNU Compiler Collection). These features, designed to fortify the software produced by GCC against various cyber threats, highlight our commitment to advancing the field of secure programming and our 30+ years of contributing to the open-source software development ecosystem.
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Gustavo A. Hoffmann
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Announcing Updates to learn.adacore.com
Some time ago, we announced some updates to the learn website. In the meantime, we published the Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming course and the initial parts of the Advanced Journey with Ada course. Today, we'd like to announce some updates that have been made to the learn website since then.
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Fabien Chouteau
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Advent of Ada/SPARK 2023 Results
At the end of November we called the Ada and SPARK programmers community to take on a challenge for a good cause. For each person completing one of the Advent of Code exercises using the Ada programming language, AdaCore would donate $10 to the Ada Developers Academy. And for those willing to go an extra mile, AdaCore would donate $20 if the solution is implemented in SPARK. We are now in January and it is time for the results!
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Fabien Chouteau
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Announcing Advent of Ada 2023: Coding for a Cause!
We're thrilled to kick off the holiday season with the second edition of Advent of Ada, a programming challenge that not only tests your coding skills but also contributes to a meaningful cause.As many of you know, Advent of Code has become a beloved tradition since its inception in 2015. The concept is simple yet brilliant: from December 1st to 25th, every day a new small programming exercise is published on the adventofcode.com website. Participants get points for each completed exercise.
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Léo Germond
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Building a GNAT SAS analysis pipeline on GitLab
This is the first part of a series in which we’ll implement a GNAT SAS analysis pipeline for Ada code on GitLab by making use of GNAT SAS 24 new features. We are focusing on getting a pipeline that "Just Works(tm)", leaving more advanced issues such as scalability, improvement of user experience, or maintainability for later.
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Forough Goudarzi
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Memory Safety in Ada and SPARK through Language Features and Tool Support
This blog post describes how Ada and SPARK provide memory safety through a combination of language features, run-time checks, and static and dynamic analysis tools.
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Forough Goudarzi
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An Introduction to Memory Safety Concepts and Challenges
This blog post explains the concept of memory safety and the most common memory errors. Then, it introduces three memory-safe languages that have built-in countermeasures against memory errors.
Announcing Ada binding to the wolfSSL library
Today, we at wolfSSL (https://www.wolfssl.com/) are happy to announce the availability of an Ada/SPARK binding that enables Ada applications to use post-quantum TLS 1.3 encryption through the wolfSSL embedded SSL/TLS library. The wolfSSL library is thread safe by design. Multiple threads can enter the library simultaneously without creating conflicts because wolfSSL avoids global data, static data, and the sharing of objects. When objects are used in the API the wolfSSL library provides opaque pointers to objects whose contents is only known internally by the wolfSSL library. This library interface design makes it easy to make bindings to other programming languages and at the same time enables the contents of the objects used internally to be highly configurable.
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Olivier Henley
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A little bit of Photoshop® using GNAT for CUDA®
Today I want to go over some internal mechanisms of a Photoshop-like application to better illustrate an up-and-coming tech, GNAT for CUDA®, developed at AdaCore.