6 ms·
Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas
- eggy 1y agoI've always liked generative art and I am getting up to speed on Ada 2022, so this is a fitting article. Currently using SPARK2014/Ada 2022 for a high-integrity, safety-critical automation control software project.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoSo is there a list or statistic of how many DOD projects actually use Ada?
- sharpy 1y agoWorked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s. I worked on exactly one Ada project. The rest were C/C++. I presume the shift away from Ada has accelerated if anythinng.
- blutack 1y agoThis might be a US/EU difference. It's pretty popular in the EU still, although some of the market has been taken by various Simulink to C tools. Every Rolls-Royce gas turbine FADEC runs ADA binaries on a custom processor [1]. It's also used extensively at Airbus. Lots of DO-178C (safety critical aerospace). 1: https://www.his-conference.co.uk/session/visiumcore-a-high-integrity-processor-for-safety-critical-applications https://www.his-conference.co.uk/session/visiumcore-a-high-i...
- ajxs 1y agoThank you for sharing this! I'd love to know more about what led them to develop their own CPU, and what the instruction set looks like. It looks like AdaCore actually merged their support for VISIUMCore into upstream GCC. The slides state it features SEU detection/correction, which is pretty interesting.
- ummonk 1y agoSeems to be standard in India as well. E.g. the newly announced made in India space microprocessor is targeted by an in house Ada compiler: https://thestateindia.com/2025/09/02/vikram-3201-india-unveils-atmanirbhar-bharat-deep%E2%80%91space-microprocessor/ https://thestateindia.com/2025/09/02/vikram-3201-india-unvei...
- p_l 1y agoOne interesting project is Saab Gripen jet fighter, whose entire software stack (other than software that is treated as "black box" firmware of certain physical components) is written in Ada, and AFAIK every sale includes complete source code and SDK to make modifications.
- zeroc8 1y agoWould love to get me some Gripen and Sdk to play around with it....
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI worked in that industry and never saw a single project using Ada, but I've always been fascinated by different programming languages.
- Jtsummers 1y agoThe DOD mandate was very short-lived, and many projects sought and received exemptions to it. So it's not surprising that, at that time, you only saw one project.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Worked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s. The Ada mandate for mission-critical software was only in place from 1991-1997.
- pjmlp 1y agoThere are enough commercial projects to keep 7 vendors in business, in a day and age where many devs refuse to pay for their tools. https://www.adacore.com/ https://www.adacore.com/ https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada https://www.ddci.com/products_score/ https://www.ddci.com/products_score/ http://www.irvine.com/tech.html http://www.irvine.com/tech.html http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm
- gte525u 1y agoThere were a lot of waivers back in the day. A couple big companies (Boeing) still use it.
- inamberclad 1y agoNvidia is notably using Ada for serval modern projects.
- tos1 1y agoI’m interested. Do you have a link or can you elaborate?
- sillywalk 1y agoLooks like they're using the SPARK subset of Ada: "NVIDIA began implementing SPARK in its security strategy in 2019 on select pieces of firmware. They began training additional personnel in SPARK and eventually developed an in-house training program. Several NVIDIA teams are now using SPARK for a wide range of applications that include image authentication and integrity checks for the overall GPU firmware image, BootROM and secure monitor firmware, and formally verified components of an isolation kernel for an embedded operating system, to name just a few."[0] https://www.adacore.com/nvidia https://www.adacore.com/nvidia [0] https://www.wevolver.com/article/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-ushers-in-a-new-era-in-security-critical-software-development https://www.wevolver.com/article/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-us...
- cpeterso 1y agoHere’s a related talk: “NVIDIA - Securing the Future of Safety and Security of Embedded Software” https://youtu.be/2YoPoNx3L5E https://youtu.be/2YoPoNx3L5E > NVIDIA is working with AdaCore to implement Ada and SPARK programming languages into certain firmware elements to reduce this potential error. In this webinar you will learn how the combination of NVIDIA hardware with Ada and SPARK delivers robustness and security, improving efficiency and safety in the development pipeline.
- jmward01 1y agoThe Marines had an entire MOS dedicated to it, 4067 Ada programmer. That was when LCPL (E-3) could own the software for a chuck of the supply system and make changes with almost no oversight... Man those were the days!
- ducktective 1y agoWould the "LLM era" revitalize languages like Ada and Haskell into mainstream?
- OhMeadhbh 1y ago[flagged]
- remixff2400 1y agoFrom the guidelines: > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. because... they don't have as many examples, documentation, textbooks, or public example projects to base generation off of, perhaps. There may be a future where documentation/servers are more formally integrated with LLMs/AI systems in a way that makes up for the relative lack of literature by plugging into a source of information that can be used to generate code/projects.
- nxobject 1y agoIt's a not-so-ideal situation: how is the marketplace of libraries and languages going to evolve when you're competing against whatever version of Python and $FRAMEWORK that was crawled a long time ago?
- tjr 1y agoIf AI is writing the code, how important is it to have new languages?
- pasc1878 1y agoThat might actually be a benefit as most public code say in C++ is not good code. If the pool is smaller but from say experienced programmers then the number of errors might be less. I can see that for Ada however most Haskell is probably written by undergraduates just learning it so not a quality code base. I think Apple researchers published a recent papaer where they had a LLM giving good Swidt code but the original corpus only included one Swift program but the AI model was tuned by experienced Swift programmers to get into a good stae for general use.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoI would love to get a list of language features that are "free to use with GNAT" and those that are "AdaCore license required." The last time I did Ada (admittedly, back in the 90s) it wasn't all that clear what language features I could use for free. And since we're on lists of things, a list of zero-cost abstractions and non-zero-cost abstractions would be nice. I'm pretty sure these aren't big issues these days, but there's still a lot of people walking around thinking "I can't use Ada on this project, I don't have budget for a commercial compiler." Maybe a "project manager's introduction to Ada." I would write it myself, but I've forgotten most everything I learned about the language and it's development community. [Apart from that... young engineers should definitely check out Ada, even if you don't eventually use it. Why it was considered a good idea to create a new language, the problems language designers were trying to solve and how developers used the language to build code that was more bullet-proof than C++ is kind of an interesting story.]
- csb6 1y ago> I would love to get a list of language features that are "free to use with GNAT" and those that are "AdaCore license required." All Ada language features are present in the free/open source version of the compiler. The proprietary version of GNAT is just updated more frequently I think and has commercial support - they periodically copy their changes into the main GCC source tree. They have proprietary tools for some kinds of static analysis, but those wouldn’t be considered language features. GNATprove (the theorem prover tool for verifying SPARK programs) is open source.
- thorn 1y agoI think AdaCore stopped supporting GNAT community in 2022 and recommended to use Alire community, no? https://blog.adacore.com/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source-community https://blog.adacore.com/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source...
- inamberclad 1y agoAlire is just a package and toolchain manager that AdaCore wrote in the style of Cargo. It still runs GNAT under the hood.
- thorn 1y agoI remember reading about Ada when I was young in 90s. I programmed in Pascal at that time, but was intrigued by Ada’s syntax. I had no book for it sadly and internet was out of reach for me too. Modern Ada looks a bit different too, they definitely added new features into the language. I quite like the syntax. I never heard about Spark/Ada before. I wonder if anyone uses Spark for real world tasks, and if yes, what for?
- pjmlp 1y agoMostly in high integrity computing deployments, those scenarios where people die when software bugs happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-integrity_software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-integrity_software A well known user is NVidia, and car industry security standards. https://www.adacore.com/press/ada-and-spark-enter-the-automotive-iso-26262-market-with-nvidia https://www.adacore.com/press/ada-and-spark-enter-the-automo...
- thorn 1y agoThanks. I wonder is it fun to program high integrity software.
- andsoitis 1y agoIf you’re curious about Ada or SPARK, a great place to start: https://learn.adacore.com/ https://learn.adacore.com/
- stevage 1y agoI did a student project at uni using Ada, building a compiler. it was a pretty nice language to work in, felt similar to Pascal. I don't remember particularly disliking anything. Declaring function parameters as in, or out, or in out, was cool.
- jmward01 1y agoThere is a special place in my programming heart for Ada since it was my first professional language (back in 1996). It is interesting to see it coming back a bit. Ignoring the language, the culture and history of Ada is a great one. I was around for the fall of the Ada mandate and I got to see the play 'Lady Ada and Castle Mandate'. The community that put that on was passionate and, obviously, quirky.
- GeertB 1y agoThat one has a special place for me. I was a consultant then and invited to join the chorus even though I wasn't at the more professional level the other cast members were. We did a performance in London and one in St Louis. Still, it was a lot of fun, and how I got to meet my spouse 25-ish years ago.
- anta40 1y agoAny recommendation on interesting/big projects written in Ada? Something like Linux or Apache server, perhaps?
- Davidbrcz 1y agohttps://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada https://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada
- anta40 1y agoHmm looks like there are some interesting stuffs under "OS and Kernels" category. Thank you.
- pjmlp 1y agoIf you mean freely available stuff, https://www.adacore.com/academia/projects/muen-project https://www.adacore.com/academia/projects/muen-project https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ada_spunky/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ada_spunky/