AdaCore has released a freely downloadable version of its GNAT GPL Ada cross-development environment for Bare Board ARM Cortex processors. Students, professors and other developers of non-proprietary software can now exploit Ada 2012's reliability, safety and security benefits for ARM applications. This product complements the toolset already available for industrial users - GNAT Pro for ARM.
GNAT GPL for Bare Board ARM Cortex processors provides a complete Ada 2012 development environment, including a comprehensive tool-chain and GPS - AdaCore's flagship Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and a tutorial and example project showing how to use Ada and GPS for the "STM32F4 Discovery" (Cortex-M4) evaluation kit from STMicroelectronics.
It also includes a fully configurable/customizable run-time library consisting of the "Small Footprint" (SFP) and Ravenscar profiles that are particularly relevant to safety-critical systems. The SFP profile corresponds to a language subset with minimal GNAT run-time routines, and the Ravenscar profile is a subset of the Ada concurrency features with an efficient, predictable, small-footprint implementation. The resulting Ada subset has expressive power well beyond that of other languages used for ARM-based devices.
"There are now billions of ARM processors in embedded systems, which has created a global ecosystem with many developers looking to take advantage of Ada's strengths," said Dr. Pat Rogers, AdaCore Bare Board product manager. "By making an Ada cross-development environment freely available to the academic and hobbyist communities, we are responding to this demand and see great potential for significantly increasing the overall usage of the Ada language. With powerful ARM-based boards currently available for under $20, this new GNAT GPL release becomes a cost-effective development environment for everyone."
The release of GNAT GPL for Bare Board ARM is part of AdaCore's ongoing commitment to the Ada community. Fully featured releases of the GNAT technology are already available for GNU Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
"Finally, the substantial software engineering benefits of the Ada 2012 language are available for the huge ARM microcontroller family," said Mike Silva, Software Engineer at the www.embeddedrelated.com community. "This is a ground-breaking achievement for the embedded programming world, offering the promise of higher quality embedded software delivered on shorter schedules."
"For our students, this is almost a game-changing new option, providing an academia-affordable, hands-on, high-integrity and fully real-world hardware/software environment for every individual student," said Dr. rer. nat. Uwe R. Zimmer, Fellow at the Australian National University. "Tools which enable the combination of high-integrity, real-time systems with concrete, real-world hardware will open doors to dependable, physical systems for many more students."
