AdaCore Releases CodePeer 3.0

Advanced static analysis tool for Ada has been qualified under DO-178B and EN50128, 
adds support for IEEE 754 floating point semantics and enhances support for project files

Boston, Mass. – Embedded Systems Conference, NEW YORK and PARIS, May 6, 2015 – AdaCore, a leading provider of development and verification tools for critical software, today released CodePeer 3.0, a major new version of its advanced static analysis tool for the automated review and validation of Ada source code. CodePeer 3.0 includes a variety of enhancements that help developers detect potential run-time and logic errors early in the software life cycle, and its deep analysis can directly support formal certification against industry-specific safety standards.

Among the new benefits of CodePeer 3.0, tool qualification material for both the avionics and railway domains is available as a product option.

“With CodePeer 3.0, our customers can take advantage of the tool’s more robust capabilities for automated code review,” said Arnaud Charlet, CodePeer Product Manager at AdaCore. “By meeting stringent industry standards for tool usage in the aviation and rail industries, CodePeer has a proven track record in the most demanding systems and can help customers in any application domain. The tool simplifies the verification effort by detecting subtle bugs in both new code that is being developed, and in existing code bases that need to be analyzed for vulnerabilities.”

For avionics applications CodePeer has been qualified as a Software Verification Tool under DO-178B, a standard that is required by certification authorities such as the FAA in the U.S. In particular, CodePeer automates a number of verification activities defined in paragraph 6.3.4f (“Accuracy and consistency”) of the DO-178B standard. These activities include detecting errors such as values outside the bounds of an Ada type or subtype, buffer overflows, integer overflow or wraparound, division by zero, use of uninitialized variables, and floating point underflow. The DO-178B qualification material available as an option with CodePeer 3.0 demonstrates that the tool performs these activities.

CodePeer has also been qualified for EN50128, the highest international standard for safety integrity concerning software for railway control and protection, including communications, signaling and processing systems. The EN50128 qualification material addresses the following:

  • Boundary value analysis to detect attempts to dereference a pointer that could be null, values outside the bounds of an Ada type or subtype, buffer overflows, integer overflow or wraparound, and division by zero.
  • Control flow analysis to detect suspicious and potentially incorrect control flows, such as unreachable code, redundant conditionals, loops that either run forever or fail to terminate normally, and subprograms that never return.
  • Data flow analysis to detect suspicious and potentially incorrect data flows, such as variables that are read before they are written (uninitialized variables), variables written more than once without being read (redundant assignments), variables that are written but never read, and parameters with an incorrect mode (unread “in” parameter, unassigned “out” parameter).

CodePeer 3.0 also adds many new features, including support for precise IEEE 754 floating point semantics, added flexibility in analyzing complex projects, improved support for legacy Ada compilers, more precise diagnostic messages, and a new check on parameter aliasing.

CodePeer is fully integrated into Adacore’s GNAT Pro development environment and comes with a number of complementary static analysis tools common to the technology – a coding standard verification tool (GNATcheck), a source code metric generator (GNATmetric) and a document generator.

A demo of the tool highlighting the new features introduced in CodePeer 3.0 will be available soon; for a demo of the previous version of the product please visit http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/demos/codepeer-2-3/

Pricing and Availability
CodePeer 3.0 is available now. Please contact AdaCore (info@adacore.com) for information on pricing and supported configurations.

About CodePeer
CodePeer is an advanced static error detection tool, assessing potential bugs before program execution to find errors efficiently and early in the development life cycle. Using advanced mathematics, CodePeer analyzes every line of code, considering every possible input and every path through the program. It performs impact and vulnerability analysis when existing code is modified, and, using control-flow, data-flow and other advanced static analysis techniques, the tool detects problems that would otherwise require labor-intensive debugging.

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 space systems, commercial avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, rail systems, 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

Contact:
Jamie Ayre

AdaCore

press@adacore.com

http://twitter.com/AdaCoreCompany

Jenna Beaucage, Rainier Communications

jbeaucage@rainierco.com; 508.475.0025, ext. 124