• Products
• Ada Answers
• Developers
• Academia
• Company

Home > Products > GNAT Pro > Safety-Critical Development

When Lives Depend on Safe and Secure Software

GNAT Pro HIE (High-Integrity Edition) is an enhanced version of GNAT Pro, designed for building safe and secure software. Its many features help to reduce the cost of developing and certifying systems that have to meet safety standards such as RTCA /DO-178B, EUROCAE ED-12B and DEF Stan 00-55/56. Key to achieving this goal is the product’s fully configurable and customizable run-time library. You can select units in an a la carte fashion, thus limiting the run-time library to just those units that are required for the Ada features used in the application, and you can adapt their implementation if desired.

Run-Time Library Configurability

Using GNAT Pro HIE’s configurable run-time capability, you can specify any level of support for Ada’s dynamic features, from none at all to the full Ada 95 language. The units included in the library may be either a subset of the standard units provided with GNAT, or they may be specially tailored to the application. This capability is useful, for example, if one of the predefined profiles provides almost all the features needed to adapt an existing system to new safety-critical requirements, and where the costs of adaptation without the additional features are considered prohibitive.

Traceability

Through a compiler switch you can generate a low-level version of the source program that reveals implementation decisions but stays basically machine independent. This helps support traceability requirements, and may be used as a reference point for verifying that the object code matches the source code. Another compiler switch produces details of data re p resentation (sizes, record layout, etc.), which is also helpful in traceability.

Simplification of Certification Effort

You can restrict language features that, although not requiring a run-time library, nevertheless could complicate the test coverage analysis part of the certification effort. For example, you can prohibit the use of constructs that would result in code with implicit loops and conditionals (such as a slice assignment).

Full Ada 2005 Implementation

In keeping with its status as the leading Ada technology, GNAT Pro is the first Ada environment to implement all of the major features included in Ada 2005, the latest revision of the Ada language. With Ada 2005, Ada continues to be on the cutting edge of programming language design. Some of the new features include:

• - Mutually Dependent Package Specifications
• - Aggregates for Limited Types
• - More Contexts for Anonymous Access Types
• - Java-like Interfaces
• - Real-Time and High-Integrity Support
• - New Pragmas
• - Predefined Library extensions

Please visit the Ada 2005 page for more information.