Highlights from Ada-Europe 2018

This year's Ada Europe was as exotic as the city in which it was hosted – Lisbon, Portugal.

Before sharing some highlights from the conference, I'd like to thank everyone who attended for making Ada-Europe 2018 such a great event, and particularly the conference organisers, who did a fantastic job organising everything, including the relaxing evening boat ride over the sea.

Ada

Ada is still going strong as arguably the best language for development of reliable and safe critical software, and this was demonstrated by the quality of talks at the conference this year. This is in no small part due to AdaCore, who have been instrumental in supporting Ada by maintaining the GPL and Pro compilers, books, education and academic programmes, and running initiatives like the Make with Ada competition, which they recently launched a new iteration of, and we recommend you take a look at. We're always happy to see AdaCore at Ada-Europe, and we're proud to have them as a partner.

Most of Rapita's software is written in Ada using GNAT Pro, so we really understand the language. This is one of the reasons that our critical software verification toolsuite, RVS, offers the best and most complete Ada language support for functional testing, coverage and timing analysis. 

Testing Ada code

Critical embedded software has to be tested to demonstrate that it's reliable and secure, even when it's written in Ada!

Testing Ada code was the subject of the first of two presentations given by our general manager, Dr. Ian Broster, at this year's conference. This focused on how to test Ada software with RapiTest and demonstrated its advanced Ada support features, which are not offered by other tools, for example letting you test values in Ada private types during unit tests without having to write any code.

The multicore revolution

The increased adoption of multicore platforms for critical applications was a hugely popular topic this year, and was the subject of many presentations. 

The need to provide evidence on the timing behavior of multi-core software presents a future challenge to many organisations in the Ada critical embedded systems domain. Dr. Broster's second presentation at this year's conference described the current state-of-the-art approach for multicore timing analysis. This approach uses tooling to support a rigorous analysis process that includes detailed characterisation of the multicore system and application of engineering expertise. This talk inspired a great Q&A session and many stimulating discussions with attendees over coffee.

RapiTetris

It was great to see so many people coming to our stand to play RapiTetris. The game, based on a modified version of Tetris integrated with RapiCover, lets players collect and view structural coverage data while they play.

For more information on RapiTetris, and to take part in the competition, visit here.

Closing remarks

Once again, all of us at Rapita would like to thank organisers and attendees alike for contributing to another great year of Ada-Europe. We'd also like to congratulate Andreas Wortmann from OHB System AG for his talk on timing analysis, which won this year's best presentation award. 

We hope to see you all again at next year's conference, which will be hosted in Warsaw, Poland by GE Aviation.