Ada

I am very happy to see that Streaksu applied for a grant and was accepted. This is what I want to see more of in the community. People creating very cool projects that they enjoy working on. Then promoting them and seeing if they can make the development of such projects a little bit more sustainable for themselves. This also disproves that “Ada projects” are not liked or as seen as old by foundations or other funding groups.

I am very happy for Streaksu and I hope to test Ironclad in a RISC-V board soon!

We just finished the Ada Monthly Meetup and here are the topics that were discussed:

• The recording of the presentations given during the Ada Developers Workshop 1 with their slides are now available
• Stemming from (@jgrivera67) J. German Rivera’s talk about HiRTOS and him working the Renode hardware emulation tool, @ohenley did a nice article about getting started with Renode and Ada programs! Check it out!
• And actually, since the last stable version of Renode, v1.15.2, released 3 weeks ago, there is a built-in demo/example of HiRTOS!
• @simonjwright created a PR for SVD2Ada for it to support dimensioned register ports!
• @Max has been working on creating an Ada toolchain for the XTENSA architecture. It is now officially part of Alire! Check the forum post for more info.
• A reminder that the Ada Crate of the Year Award is still taking place!
• We had a discussion on whether there should be a proposal for an Ada Devroom for next year’s FOSDEM.
• There will be a forum thread about this topic “shortly”.
• With the “demise” of SIGAda, the proposal of the creation of the Ada Users Society is moving along, which was approved in the General Assembly (GA) of Ada-Europe this past month of June.
• The next GA of Ada-Europe will be taking place in a couple of weeks, the next 26th of September. Remember to ask for the meetup link if you would like to join!
• We had a couple of discussions during the meetup and afterwards regarding some doubts and timeline/availability of the new Ada Users Society.
• A complete working Alire manifest has been created for the WolfSSL library 2.
• Though it is not in Alire’s index! It still needs some work, but you can already start using it!
• @stcarrez and @Max have been working on Ada-Enet, an embedded network stack written in Ada.
• It is now available in Alire and it has a few STM32 drivers already!
• @Max also has an ethernet stack written in Ada, which has also been added ot Alire
• @simonjwright updated us on the state (and struggles) of the Ada support on the newly released RP 2350 CPU 1.
• Progress is good and small examples are already running on the chip. Interrupts are still a problem to be solved :slight_smile:
• @AJ-Ianozi reminded us about the latest Yet Another Static Site (Generator) and its features, which recently had its 3.1.0 release

That is all that was discussed today!

The competition has three prizes of $2,000 each!

Just came across a donation site for the Alire project.

Contributing to the Ada open source ecosystem through the Alire package manager for Ada/SPARK

Online participation in the Ada Developers Workshop will be free of charge! It is still a requirement to register. As a reminder, the Workshop's programe has been available for a while, so go ahead an take a look! 🤩

GNAT FSF 14 is now available in a special index branch. Use this command to add the index branch:

alr index "--add=git+https://github.com/alire-project/alire-index#gnat-fsf-14.1" --name=gnat_fsf_14 --before=community

And then alr index --del=gnat_fsf_14 to remove it once your done playing with it.

If you have some time to give it a try and give me some feedback that would be great 👍️

#gcc #alire

The list of presentations looks great!

• New implementation-defined aspects and pragmas:
  • Local_Restrictions, which specifies that a particular subprogram does not violate one or more local restrictions, nor can it call a subprogram that is not subject to the same requirements.
  • User_Aspect_Definition and User_Aspect, which provide a mechanism for avoiding textual duplication if some set of aspect specifications is needed in multiple places.
• New implementation-defined aspects and pragmas for verification of the SPARK 2014 subset of Ada:
  • Always_Terminates, which provides a condition for a subprogram to necessarily complete (either return normally or raise an exception).
  • Ghost_Predicate, which introduces a subtype predicate that can reference Ghost entities.
  • Exceptional_Cases, which lists exceptions that might be propagated by the subprogram with side effects in the context of its precondition and associates them with a specific postcondition.
  • Side_Effects, which indicates that a function should be handled like a procedure with respect to parameter modes, Global contract, exceptional contract and termination: it may have output parameters, write global variables, raise exceptions and not terminate.
• The new attributes and contracts have been applied to the relevant parts of the Ada runtime library, which has been subsequently proven to be correct with SPARK 2014.
• Support for the LoongArch architecture.
• Support for vxWorks 7 Cert RTP has been removed.
• Additional hardening improvements. For more information reltated to hardening options, refer to the GCC Instrumentation Options and the GNAT Reference Manual, Security and Hardening Features.
• Improve style checking for redundant parentheses with -gnatyz
• New switch -gnateH to force reverse Bit_Order threshold to 64.
• Experimental features:
  • Storage Model: this feature proposes to redesign the concepts of Storage Pools into a more efficient model allowing higher performances and easier integration with low footprint embedded run-times.
  • String Interpolation: allows for easier string formatting. Further clean up and improvements to the GNAT code.