AdaCore Releases QGen 2.1 and GNAT Pro 7.4

AdaCore Releases QGen 2.1 and GNAT Pro 7.4
New version of model-based development and verification toolset brings improved performance and new features; new version of Ada Development Environment includes more than 120 new features

EMBEDDED WORLD 2016, Nuremberg, Germany, February 23, 2016 – At the trade fair Embedded World, AdaCore, a company offering development and verification tools for reliable, safe, and secure software, presents new releases of two of the company’s products: the 2.1 version of QGen, a tool for model-based development and verification, as well as version 7.4 of the GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment.

AdaCore QGen 2.1
AdaCore today 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
Today at Embedded World, 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.”

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