Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year 2025 Winners Announced!
In 2025, we announced our fifth Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. The Alire source package manager is a game-changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use the Crate of the Year awards to honor the people contributing to the ecosystem.
This year is special, however, as we lost one of the most significant contributors to the Ada community, Simon Wright.
If you have ever asked a question about Ada on StackOverflow or programmed in Ada on macOS in the last decade, you have benefited, in one way or another, from Simon’s generosity, kindness, and dedication to Ada and its community.
This is why we decided to award,
A special Crate of the Year Prize to Simon Wright.
To celebrate Simon’s passion for helping others, the monetary prize associated with the award will be donated to DigiLocal, a UK-based charity giving marginalised young people the opportunity to discover and develop their digital talents.
The SPARK Crate of the Year Prize is awarded to Quentin Dauprat for Distance.
“Distance” is a formally verified SPARK library for computing distance and similarity metrics.
This library covers a wide range of distance definitions, from Euclidean (the distance between two points in space) to Levenshtein (the minimum number of single-character edits between two pieces of text).
Quentin is one of the first members of the Ada/SPARK community to explore the use of LLMs and coding agents and to share his experience online. Ada, and SPARK in particular, with their strong code validation features, have an interesting role to play in the future of assisted coding.
Beyond the “Distance” crate, we also want to support Quentin in his ambitious Adarium project, aiming to build modern, open-source libraries and frameworks that leverage Ada/SPARK's rigorous safety guarantees.
with Distance.Textual.Levenshtein;
function String_Levenshtein is new Distance.Textual.Levenshtein
(Character, Positive, String);
D : constant Natural := String_Levenshtein ("kitten", "sitting");
-- D = 3The Ada Crate of the Year Prize is awarded to Stephane Carrez for Ada Web Application (AWA)
Ada Web Application and its ecosystem of crates (ado, elada, keystoreada, serverfaces, wikiada, etc.) constitute a complete framework for building a Web Application in Ada/SPARK. This includes login, authentication, users, permissions, managing comments, tags, votes, documents, and more.
Developing a large framework that provides the foundations on which you can build your own web application is already an impressive task. But we also want to highlight the top-notch documentation Stephane provided for AWA.
For a long time, Stephane has been a prominent contributor to the Ada community. He was, in fact, the very first winner of our Make with Ada competition back in 2016. Beyond coding, Stephane's contributions include the development and maintenance of the website of the Ada-France association, running with AWA, of course!
Author
Fabien Chouteau
Fabien joined AdaCore in 2010 after his engineering degree at the EPITA (Paris). He is involved in real-time, embedded and hardware simulation technology. Maker/DIYer in his spare time, his projects include electronics, music and woodworking.
