AdaCore has released the latest version of its model-based development and verification toolset, QGen.QGen provides a qualifiable and customizable code generator from Simulink® and Stateflow® models to the safety-oriented programming languages SPARK (a formally analyzable Ada subset) and MISRA C. QGen 2.1 supports essentially all constructs used for modeling safety-critical control systems.In addition, QGen 2.1 offers a number of other enhancements including optimization of code for switch blocks, the ability to add external code for Lookup tables and Prelookup blocks, support for commented-out / commented-through blocks, and factoring of code for reference models and model libraries. QGen 2.1 is compatible with MATLAB versions 2008b through 2015b.
As a prototype capability, initial support for model-level debugging is available as a supplement to QGen 2.1.Using the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) IDE, developers can debug both “pure” Simulink®/Stateflow® models and applications that combine manually prepared code with the auto-generated code.
QGen 2.1 will help reduce the effort in model-based development and verification, and future releases will continue to broaden the QGen product line. Among the planned enhancements is support for transforming high-level requirements into executable and verifiable assertions at the model and code levels.
AdaCore GNAT Pro 7.4
At Embedded World 2016, AdaCore also announced the release of the latest version of its flagship GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment. GNAT Pro 7.4 incorporates new functionality, a number of performance improvements, additional platform support including several new embedded targets, and many other enhancements.
GNAT Pro includes a full Ada compiler, Integrated Development Environments– the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) and the Eclipse-based GNATbench – a comprehensive toolset including a visual debugger, and an extensive set of libraries and bindings.
GNAT Pro 7.4 continues to build upon the strong foundation of gcc 4.9 while upgrading to the gdb 7.10 debugger technology. It supports Windows 10 as well as several new target platforms, in particular VxWorks 7 (ARM, e500v2, PPC, x86_64), VxWorks 653 3.0, and PikeOS (PowerPC). Among the more than 120 new features are the following enhancements:
•Generating C headers from Ada package specifications, which complements the existing facility (-fdump-ada-spec) for deriving Ada package specs from C header files
•Detecting invalid memory access via libsanitizer on Linux
•Enabling SSE floating point extensions by default on all x86 native ports
•Better performance for the Ada.Containers library, for example in the implementation of "for...of" loops and iterations
“As we do each year with GNAT Pro, this new release brings a wide assortment of new features,” said Cyrille Comar, AdaCore President. “It also makes many existing tools more robust or easier to use, and these are worth mentioning. One example is the GNATtest utility, which automatically generates ready-to-use unit test frameworks. And I’d also like to highlight the distributed feature of GPRbuild, which can now take advantage of server farms as well as multicores. Advanced users have reported incredible savings in build time for huge applications through this enhancement.”
