AdaCore Launches “Make with Ada” Programming Competition, with €5000 Top Prize

Programming competition aimed at embedded systems programmers, to demonstrate Ada’s benefits for reliable, safe and secure software

NEW YORK and PARIS, JUNE 20, 2016 - AdaCore today announced the launch of the “Make with Ada” programming competition, a contest that aims to help the embedded software community improve the quality of their code by encouraging the use of the Ada and SPARK programming languages. The competition will run from June 20 to September 30, 2016 and offers over €8000 in total prizes. Participants can register for the competition at www.makewithada.org.

Competition Rules
The competition is open to individuals and to teams with up to four members. The goal is to design and implement an embedded software project for an ARM Cortex M or R processor where Ada and/or SPARK are the principal language technologies. Entrants will need to demonstrate that their system meets its requirements and has been developed using sound software engineering practices. Submission deadline is September 30, 2016. The award winners will be announced in November 2016.

Prizes and Judging Criteria
Cash prizes will be awarded to the projects that best meet the overall criteria of software dependability, openness, collaborativeness and inventiveness.

  • Top Prize - 5000 Euros
  • Second Prize – 2000 Euros
  • Third Prize – 1000 Euros

Two special awards (nano-drones) will also be offered: one for the project rated best for dependability, and the other for the project rated best for inventiveness.

Judges
The competition judges include embedded systems experts Jack Ganssle, Principal Consultant at The Ganssle Group; Dick Selwood, Europe Editor at TechfocusMedia; Bill Wong, Technical Editor at Penton Media; and Cyrille Comar, AdaCore President.

“Building an application in Ada on a deeply-embedded microcontroller like the Cortex M or R will be a ton of fun, and is a great way to demonstrate how Ada leads to great code,” said competition judge Jack Ganssle.

“This is an exciting opportunity for developers to try a new technology and show their imagination and programming talents,” said Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer and author of the Make With Ada blog post series. “Ada is most known for its usage in large-scale long-lived systems but it is also an excellent tool even for the most humble embedded project.”

The “Make with Ada” competition is part of an overall AdaCore initiative to foster the growth of Ada and SPARK for developing embedded systems and more generally for developing “software that matters”. Other elements of this initiative are the free on-line training available at AdaCore U, and the various resources for free software developers and students/hobbyists at the github repository and the libre site.

Further information about Ada and SPARK, along with links to free resource pages and instructions on how to get started by downloading the GNAT GPL edition for Bare Board ARM, are available at makewithada.org/getting-started.

About Ada and SPARK
Ada is a modern, internationally standardized programming language with a long and successful track record in the development of high-reliability embedded systems. Its strong typing and compile-time checking help catch errors early, when they are easiest and least expensive to correct. The most recent version of the Ada standard, Ada 2012, supports contract-based programming (pre- and postconditions for subprograms), which in effect embeds the software’s low-level requirements as checkable assertions in the source code. In critical systems where testing alone might not provide sufficient confidence, the SPARK subset of Ada supports mathematics-based assurance that relevant program properties are met (for example, the absence of run-time errors such as buffer overflow). SPARK can be introduced incrementally into a project, and contracts can be verified either statically (by the SPARK proof engine) or dynamically (with run-time checks).

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification tools for mission-critical, safety-critical, and security-critical systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

  • The GNAT Pro development environment for Ada, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability,
  • The CodePeer advanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development and retrospectively on existing software,
  • The SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset based on formal methods and oriented towards high-assurance systems, and
  • The QGen model-based development tool, a qualifiable and customizable code generator and verifier for Simulink® and Stateflow® models, intended for safety-critical control systems.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as railway systems, space systems, commercial avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, medical devices, and financial services.  AdaCore has an extensive and growing world-wide customer base; see www.adacore.com/customers/ for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert on-line support provided by the developers themselves. The company has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com


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