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CodePeer 2.1

AdaCore — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:14:33 +0000

CodePeer 2.1 is a major new version and introduces many enhancements:

- Full support for Ada 2012

- More extensive analysis for race conditions

- Support for elaboration code and order

- More precise preconditions

- Improved handling of unused assignments

A WEBINAR presenting the new features of CodePeer 2.1 tool will take place on April 10th:
http://www.adacore.com/home/products/gnatpro/webinars/

For more information on CodePeer, please visit:

GNAT Pro 7.0.1

AdaCore — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:04:15 +0000

GNAT Pro 7.0.1 is a major new release and includes many enhancements:

Compiler:

- Complete Ada 2012 support

- New controlled type implementation (better memory usage)

- New warnings and improved error messages

- Array processing and composite return values optimizations

Tools:

- Many new options and pretty-printing improvements in gnatpp

- Coupling metrics now available in gnatmetric

New Components:

GNATtest

A WEBINAR presenting the new GNATtest tool will take place on March 20th:
http://www.adacore.com/home/products/gnatpro/webinars/

‘Project P’ and ‘Hi-MoCo’ Research Projects Launched

AdaCore — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:35:24 +0000

Open-source research projects combine model-based integration and qualified code generation for safety-critical systems

TOULOUSE, France, PARIS and NEW YORK, February 1, 2012 – ERTS Congress - AdaCore today announced its participation in ‘Project P’ and ‘Hi-MoCo’ (High-Integrity Model Compiler), two open-source research efforts supported and partly funded by the French and Estonian national governments and the European EUREKA agency. The combined projects, which started in October 2011, aim to provide an open-source, tunable and qualifiable code generation framework for domain-specific modeling languages. The key idea is to allow control engineers (using Simulink, Stateflow and Scicos/XCos), system engineers (using SysML/MARTE and AADL), and software engineers (using UML) to easily collaborate for system-level model integration, verification, and final optimized code generation targeting the Ada 2012, C/C++ and VHDL languages.

AdaCore, the technical coordinator of the projects, is working closely with the IB Krates team led by Tõnu Näks and members from IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) led by Marc Pantel, the principal architects of the ITEA GeneAuto project and technology on which Project P and Hi-MoCo are based. AdaCore, IB Krates, and IRIT will be the principal contributors to the code generation technology at the heart of the toolset being developed. Together with Frédéric Pothon of ACG Solutions and chair of the Tool Qualification subgroup of the DO-178C committee, the three companies will play a major role in the cross-domain qualification effort spanning the avionics, space, and automotive domains. AdaCore’s expertise in developing and supporting the certification/qualification of tunable, open-source commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) components and tools that meet safety and reliability certification standards such as DO-178 (avionics) and ECSS-E-ST-40 (space) will be especially relevant.

“The ultimate goal of these projects is to end the segregation between the control, system and software engineers,” said Franco Gasperoni, Managing Director of AdaCore. “A major bottleneck in the model-driven development of software for avionics, space, and automotive systems is the integration of heterogeneous models and the lack of comprehensive verification and code generation technologies. Project P and Hi-MoCo aim to solve this problem by developing an open-source, tunable and qualifiable code generation framework for heterogeneous models, while making cross-domain qualification material available.”

“The current state-of-the-art is to perform integration on generated sources,” concluded Matteo Bordin, project manager of the Project P and Hi-MoCo efforts at AdaCore. “We are proposing to do this at the model level to verify integration issues well before models are mature enough for code generation.”

About Project P
Project P is a three-year research project financially supported within the French FUI 2011 funding framework. Headed by Continental Automotive France, it involves the collaboration of 19 partners, including major industrial users from the avionics, automotive and space domains (Airbus, Astrium, Continental Automotive, Rockwell Collins, Safran, Thales Alenia Space and Thales Avionics), technology providers (AdaCore, Altair, STInformatique, Scilab Enterprise), service companies (ACG Solutions, Aboard Engineering, Atos Origins) and research centers (ENPC, IRIT-INPT/CNRS, INRIA, ONERA, Lab-STICC/Université de Bretagne Sud). Additional information can be found at http://www.open-do.org/projects/p.

About Hi-MoCo
Hi-MoCo is a two-year research project financially supported within the Eurostar 2011 funding framework. It supports the collaboration of IB Krates (Estonia), IRIT, and AdaCore.

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railroad systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services. The SPARK Pro toolset, available from AdaCore, is especially useful in such contexts.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com

Press Contacts

press@adacore.com
http://twitter.com/AdaCoreCompany

Jessie Glockner
Rainier Communications (for AdaCore)
Tel: 508-475-0025 x140
adacore@rainierco.com
http://twitter.com/JessieGlockner

AdaCore Launches GNATtest

AdaCore — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:30:50 +0000

Unit test harness generator reduces test development effort for large software projects

TOULOUSE, France, PARIS and NEW YORK, February 1, 2012 – ERTS Congress - AdaCore, provider of Ada tools and expertise for the mission-critical, safety-critical, and security-critical software communities, today announced the immediate availability of the GNATtest unit test harness generator for Ada. The GNATtest tool helps automate the essential, but tedious and error-prone, processes for developing and managing the large number of test cases that accompany the verification of large software systems.

The task of writing and managing unit tests and their invocation framework is critical to the development of high-reliability software, but it is repetitive and cumbersome for large projects, and error-prone when done manually. Changes to the application software during development and maintenance, such as adding a subprogram to a package (module) or changing a subprogram’s specification (interface), require corresponding modifications to the test suite and its invocation harness. GNATtest addresses this issue by automatically creating and maintaining the harnessing code, as well as the unit test skeletons for each subprogram to be tested, taking into account all Ada semantics (subprogram overloading, visibility, etc.). The developer can thus focus on the high-value task of writing the actual test cases.

“At AdaCore, we emphasize the principle that developing critical software can be done more efficiently by combining rigor with the use of agile methods,” said Cyrille Comar, Managing Director of AdaCore. “This requires continuous testing, and a tool like GNATtest is essential for keeping quickly evolving software in sync with its unit tests.”

GNATtest is a valuable tool for developing all kinds of software, whether host-based or embedded, across the entire spectrum of application domains, and fits in smoothly with modern development approaches such as agile methods. It is especially valuable in systems requiring high levels of reliability, safety, and/or security, as it simplifies the effort required to implement test procedures and produce test cases that meet the objectives of certification standards such as DO-178B and DO-178C. These standards emphasize requirements-based testing as a critical part of the software verification process. Since individual subprograms often directly implement low-level requirements, the test harness and skeletons generated by GNATtest can become an immediate part of the application’s certification evidence. When combined with a coverage technology such as GNATcoverage, GNATtest offers a unique solution for verifying embedded Ada software.

For developers who are using the more advanced features of the Ada language, GNATtest handles object-oriented programs and can help verify type substitutability (known as the Liskov Substitution Principle) as required by DO-178C’s supplement on Object-Oriented Technology and Related Techniques (DO-332). GNATtest also takes advantage of Ada 2012 programming-by-contract capabilities, such as preconditions, postconditions and invariants.

GNATtest is included in GNAT Pro and supports all versions of Ada and all target configurations. It is based on, and replaces, the earlier AUnit technology.

Webinar
A webinar presenting unit-testing strategies using GNATtest and GNATcoverage will be held on Tuesday, March 20. For more information and/or to register, please visit: http://www.adacore.com/home/products/gnatpro/webinars/

Press Contacts

press@adacore.com
http://twitter.com/AdaCoreCompany

Jessie Glockner
Rainier Communications (for AdaCore)
Tel: 508-475-0025 x140
adacore@rainierco.com
http://twitter.com/JessieGlockner

Developing secure code using SPARK (Part 2)

AdaCore — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:48:54 +0000

EE Times

Developing secure code using SPARK

AdaCore — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:47:17 +0000

EE Times

AdaCore and SofCheck Merge

AdaCore — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:41:25 +0000

Ada expert Tucker Taft joining AdaCore as Director of Language Research

NEW YORK, PARIS, and LEXINGTON, Mass., January 10, 2012 – AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada development tools and support services, today announced a merger with SofCheck, Inc., a Lexington, Massachusetts-based automated software quality (ASQ) company. SofCheck’s staff has joined the AdaCore technical team, and SofCheck Founder Tucker Taft has been named as AdaCore’s Director of Language Research. AdaCore has acquired SofCheck’s products, including static error detection tools, the AdaMagic compiler front end technology, and also ParaSail, a new Parallel Specification and Implementation Language intended for high-reliability applications on multicore target platforms.

AdaCore and SofCheck personnel share a long and direct involvement in the design of the Ada programming language, and the two companies have specialized in software development tools that nicely complement each other. AdaCore’s major product is GNAT Pro, a development environment especially suited for long-lived systems with requirements for reliability, safety, and/or security. SofCheck’s advanced static analysis technology fits in smoothly with GNAT Pro, and prior to the merger the two companies jointly developed AdaCore’s CodePeer product, an efficient and accurate code reviewer that incorporates the SofCheck static analysis engine.

“AdaCore and SofCheck have worked towards common goals for a very long time,” said Tucker Taft, SofCheck’s Chairman and Founder. “This merger is a natural next-step for both our companies: the whole SofCheck team is very excited to be joining up with AdaCore where together we can continue adding capabilities to the industry-leading CodePeer static analysis technology, while creating new offerings for customers building and certifying high-integrity software as they move into the multicore era.”

“Our complementary skills, shared history, and dedication to the software engineering principles supported by the Ada programming language have made this merger a positive, seamless experience for both companies,” said Robert Dewar, AdaCore President and CEO. “We particularly welcome Tucker’s addition to AdaCore’s existing team of experts, which will help us move forward with our joint goal of improving software engineering capabilities for developers of safe, secure, and highly-reliable software applications.”

About SofCheck
Founded by a team of internationally recognized leaders in the development of programming languages and compiler technology, SofCheck has focused principally on the automated software quality (ASQ) domain for its products and services. The company’s tools have enabled software development organizations to build critical systems efficiently, through automated, advanced static error detection without unit testing or style checking. SofCheck has also developed a reusable Ada compiler front end technology that can be easily integrated into software tools. SofCheck Founder Tucker Taft was the lead designer of Ada 95 and a major contributor to the Ada 2005 and Ada 2012 language revisions. Recently, he has been working on the design of the ParaSail language.

Press Contacts

press@adacore.com
http://twitter.com/AdaCoreCompany

Jessie Glockner
Rainier Communications (for AdaCore)
Tel: 508-475-0025 x140
adacore@rainierco.com
http://twitter.com/JessieGlockner

SPARK Pro 10.1

AdaCore — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:12:42 +0000

AdaCore is pleased to announce the availability of SPARK Pro 10.1 on the following platforms:

sparc-solaris
x86-linux
x86_64-darwin
x86_64-linux
x86-windows

This is a major release including many new features:

Generics Phase 1 – Release 10.1 includes the first phase of the addition of support for Ada generics to the SPARK language and toolset
Dynamic Flow Analyser and VCG Heaps
Unicode characters now allowed in strings
Improved use of types and subtypes in FDL
Improvements to Simplifier tactics and performance
Auto-generation of refinement rules
Improvements to SPARKBridge
New SPARKClean utility

The new features will be presented in a webinar on Tuesday February 21st, 2012.
For more information and to register, please visit:

www.adacore.com/home/products/sparkpro/language_toolsuite/webinars

Further details of the new features are as follows:

Generics Phase 1
Release 10.1 includes the first phase of the addition of support for Ada generics to the SPARK language and toolset. This first phase includes support for generic subprograms. Users can now write programs which declare a generic subprogram, then instantiate and call the instantiations. The SPARK toolset has been significantly updated to provide flow analysis and proof of VCs generated from the first phase subset of generics, although analysis of the generic subprogram body itself will be added in the next phase. Two new documents have been added to the user documentation set for generics. “SPARK Generics – A user view” describes a subset of Ada Generics which is defined for SPARK 95 and onwards whilst maintaining the underlying design principles of SPARK. A more concise specification of SPARK generics is given in the “SPARK Generics LRM”. The motivation for incorporating generics into SPARK is – as with Ada – to provide the user with reusable components. In SPARK, these can be implemented and proven once but instantiated many times without requiring the implementation of the component to be re-analysed. The introduction of generics will provide a means, in a future release, to provide more SPARK versions of the Ada libraries, in particular the Ada Container Library.

Dynamic Flow Analyser and VCG Heaps
The main Examiner data structures used by the flow-analyser and the verification-condition generator have been re-implemented so they now extend themselves automatically rather than hitting a capacity limit. This means that the user no longer has to select between two statically-sized versions of the Examiner – spark and megaspark. A new debug option “-debug=t” has been implemented that gives more detail when “-statistics” is also selected. This option currently produces a histogram showing the peak usage of each major data structure.
As a result of the internal changes made in implementing this new feature users should also notice a reduction in the time taken to launch the Examiner.

Unicode characters now allowed in string literals
The Examiner now supports string literals containing Unicode characters. This allows, for example, strings containing umlauts, as in Sausage : constant String := “Thüringer Bratwurst”;

Improved use of types and subtypes in FDL
It is now becoming increasingly common to use other proof systems such as Alt-Ergo (via SPARKBridge), Isabelle and Riposte to discharge SPARK VCs. It can be very beneficial to these proof systems to have richer type information included in the FDL. Consequently, the Examiner has been modified to produce this information.
This change is backward compatible, so the Simplifier will still accept the generated FDL and discharge VCs as before. Other proof systems can make use of this information to significantly narrow the bounds for variables they reason about.

Improvements to Simplifier tactics and performance
The Simplifier includes new deduction rules and tactics for numeric expressions and VCs that arise from loop statements that iterate over an unconstrained array type. These new rules and tactics will give improved performance from the Simplifier when discharging certain types of VCs.

Auto-generation of refinement rules
The Examiner will now generate refinement rules for refined own variables alleviating the need for some user rules. This will benefit users performing proofs involving abstract/refined own variables by allowing more VCs to be discharged automatically.

SPARKBridge
Whilst still an experimental feature, a number of changes have been made to SPARKBridge and support for Victor – a feature that gives access to alternate theorem provers.
- The -solver option for Victor has been extended to allow additional SMT solvers to be used: CVC3, Yices and Z3. Alt-Ergo is still supported and remains the only prover actually shipped with SPARK.
- Victor has been updated to the latest upstream version. The most important new features are support for SMTLIB2 and support for user rules.
- Victor and Alt-Ergo are now shipped and supported for OSX. This expands experimental support for Victor to the main three platforms: Windows, GNU/Linux and OSX.

SPARKClean
A new utility has been added to SPARK to clean out files generated by the SPARK tools. By default this tool simply deletes all vcg, rep, lst, siv, sum, etc. files when invoked without arguments. A user manual for SPARKClean is available with the release that provides full documentation of the options available.

GPS 5.1

AdaCore — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:59:53 +0000

AdaCore is pleased to announce the release of GPS 5.1. This major release sees many new enhancements including:

Improved support for C/C++:

Initial support for smart completion

Ada-to-C source navigation

Improved CodePeer support

Availability of score card

Improved filtering

Locations view now synced with CodePeer report

Ability to specify alternate database/output directories

Detailed race condition report

New facility for handling VCS menus

All VCS menus are now handled in a centralized place allowing customization of the layout of all VCS menus

Availability of additional automatic code fixes
Export browser contents to PDF
More intuitive handling of the MDI (multiple document interface), search window and code browsers

All new features are described in the release note section on GNAT Tracker. A selection will also be demoed in the upcoming webinar featuring GPS 5.1. For more information and to enroll, please visit:

http://www.adacore.com/home/gnatpro/webinars/

GPS 5.1. is compatible with GNAT Pro versions 3.16a1 up to 6.4.

GPS 5.1 is available for the GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows hosts.

Webinar – Developing Ada solutions using UML and GPS – more info

AdaCore — Fri, 19 May 2006 10:30:55 +0000

May 24 - 10am EST / 3pm GMT / 4pm CET
May 24 - 1pm EST / 6pm GMT / 7pm CET

Presented by ARTiSAN and AdaCore, the leading developer of Ada technology, this webinar will provide an overview of Ada 2005 and how AdaCore’s development environment, “GNAT Programming Studio” (GPS) and ARTiSAN Studio can be used as a workable tool-chain.