The purpose of this devroom is to present, showcase and discuss the Ada programming language, its ecosystem, evolution and the projects that make use of it.

About Ada

Ada is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for embedded and mission-critical software engineering, although nowadays it also supports object orientation, contracts and formal verification. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services, medical devices, etc. It is also perfectly suited for open source development with a fully open compiler (part of GCC), a formal verification system and a knowledgeable and vibrant community.

Why Ada?

Awareness of safety and security issues in software systems is increasing. The NSA recently published a list of programming languages that are recommended for the development of new software due to their memory safety and Ada was one of the list (one of the three compiled non-garbage collected languages!). In that context, it should be no surprise that NVIDIA has started using Ada/SPARK for their highest critical parts in their GPUs!

Multi-core platforms are now abundant and small, embedded devices are growing exponentially. These are some of the reasons that the Ada programming language and technology attracts more and more attention due to Ada’s support for programming by contract, performant and efficient code, high- and low-level abstractions and support for multi-core targets. The latest Ada language definition, Ada 2022, was approved by ISO as an international standard two years ago. Work on implementing the new features is ongoing, such as improved support for fine-grained parallelism, which were introduced in the new standard. The Ada-related technology, SPARK, provides a complete solution for the safety and security aspects stated above while being fully open source, making it stand out from other formal verification tools, as Ada/SPARK code is compiled directly into ready-to-run programs, which can run on embedded systems.

More and more tools are available, many are open source, including for small and modern platforms. Interest in Ada keeps increasing, also in the open source community, from which many exciting projects have been started.