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Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

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Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#41

Post by shakna »

whytevuhuni wrote: post #34
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years ago NVidia did not consider Rust mature enough for their use cases. This is the original announcement from 2020, "SPARK/Ada Journey to Adoption" https://youtu.be/DZSSyWlsb28?si=vh4gO-LT2N3Skaql Also we are now on Ada 202x already, quite different from Ada83, that some Rust folks keep comparing their favourite language with. You get all the niceties of a language more in line with Object Pascal productivity, f…

I don't know Ada / SPARK, and I've been trying to figure this out. Based on the hallucinations I got from ChatGPT, it seems Ada itself is nowhere near as powerful as Rust in safety, while Ada with SPARK disallows some things I was considering to be quite basic, such as shared aliasing of data. For example, it seems it's not possible to get a sub-string slice reference to an original unbounded string. In rust, a &str…

I don't think a single point there is true.

Ada has had shared aliases since 1995. Its had zero cost abstractions since before then.

Slicing memory from a string is in the intro manual, for example.

    my_var(2 .. 6)
Ada doesn't rely on you to be disciplined. [0] Memory safety comes with SPARK. Its a theorum prover.

[0] https://blog.adacore.com/memory-safety-in-ada-and-spark-thro...

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#42

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #30
cashsterling wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... my intro CS class was in C and Ada95 (I'm not a CS guy btw, just took the class). I actually preferred Ada over C... but continued to program in C for other classes because of compiler availability; I had to do all my Ada programming on Sparc workstations at school. I personally think that AdaCore, and friends, missed an opportunity in the early 2000's to fully embrace open source... they left a big gap which…

We are on Ada 202x nowadays being discussed, and in a world where FOSS tool makers have problems making a sustainable business, always changing licenses, there are still 7 Ada vendors selling compilers.

Libre compilers do not impose restrictions on output.

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#43

Post by anthk »

firesteelrain wrote: post #11
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

But why? The US military abandoned Ada for the F-35 and moved to C++ instead. Is it me or are they moving backwards?

Language selection is no panacea for bad systems engineering or poor project management

It helps on security and correctness. Either you are a Forth like guy/gal stating how a firmware will work at every level (low, med, high, every one), cutting down every flaw by getting it as small and predictable as possible (even by ditching floats for rationals and decimal scaling), or a high level Lisp/CL/Java/C# guy with a garbage collector and some memory safety. And Java/C# and some Lisps aren't nowhere as strict on that as ADA.

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#44

Post by shakna »

dardeaup wrote: post #13
johnisgood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ada's developmemt tools are fewer, less featued Such as?

Regarding the number of options, C++ has quite a few IDEs: Visual Studio, Xcode, VSCode, CLion, and probably more (Oracle probably still sells the one they had for Solaris). For command-line compilers, C++ has: Visual Studio, Xcode, g++, clang++, IBM C++ compilers for their OSs, Oracle compilers for Solaris, etc. For Ada, is there anything other than AdaCore? Is that the same as GNATStudio? Edit* - fixed Ada capitali…

There's GNAT, augusta, byron, hac, janus, apex, Greenhills, xgc compilers.

Each of those has an optional IDE. All of the IDEs you mentioned also support Ada.

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#45

Post by Ygg2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #35
whytevuhuni wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know Ada / SPARK, and I've been trying to figure this out. Based on the hallucinations I got from ChatGPT, it seems Ada itself is nowhere near as powerful as Rust in safety, while Ada with SPARK disallows some things I was considering to be quite basic, such as shared aliasing of data. For example, it seems it's not possible to get a sub-string slice reference to an original unbounded string. In rust, a &str…

Less ChatGPT and more language reference manuals, ChatGPT isn't an ancient oracle knows it all, even though Microsoft's marketing sells it as such. Ada has as much zero cost abstractions as C++ and Rust have, and one of the reasons of Ravenscar is even what to turn off for bare metal deployments, and real time OS deployments.

To be fair to ChatGPT, trying to find good documentation for Ada +/- Spark hasn't been quite as smooth sailing as trying to find something for C++.

> Ada has as much zero cost abstractions as C++ and Rust have.

Couldn't find anything about it (see above), but does Ada come with any monomorphization tricks?

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#46

Post by FirmwareBurner »

seabird wrote: post #8
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

But why? The US military abandoned Ada for the F-35 and moved to C++ instead. Is it me or are they moving backwards?

Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent. I get that there's more tools for C++ but first class formal verification support and a language that's generally designed to save you from yourself seems like something you would stand your ground on. Ada is supremely good at killing people and/or keeping them un-killed, there's a reason…

>Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent.

Do you think the auto industry will have a easier time finding Ada talent at their pay rates? Or that talent will want to specialize into Ada just to pigeonhole themselves into the Automotive jobs market?

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#47

Post by fransje26 »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

But why? The US military abandoned Ada for the F-35 and moved to C++ instead. Is it me or are they moving backwards?

Ever wondered why F-35 is so famous for software bugs, including in-flight reboot from avionics?

Since Lockheed struck a deal with the government allowing them to no longer communicate the number of issues encountered on the F-35 program, news reports have only been writing about how it has been the best thing since sliced bread. (Save for the mishaps happening from time to time..)

Which is entertaining, because until that point (2021, if memory serves?) it was encountering an ever increasing number of critical issues needing resolving, a double dozen of which would be lethal to the pilot flying. The backlog stood at 800+ issues at the time.

Some of the software issues were so serious that they were considered beyond salvageable at the time, despite having already gone through a full re-write from scratch cycle..

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#48

Post by FirmwareBurner »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

But why? The US military abandoned Ada for the F-35 and moved to C++ instead. Is it me or are they moving backwards?

Ever wondered why F-35 is so famous for software bugs, including in-flight reboot from avionics?

Are those bugs because of C++, or because of bad programing skills and practices? No programming language can save you from bugs if you hire people who don't know what they're doing. I used to work in automotive when a lot of the critical safety SW was only assembly and the end product didn't have any critical bugs.

Maybe Lockheed just has shitty programmers who don't know what they're doing because the US defense industry is incompetent and the US SW jobs market top heavy where talent who does know how to use C++ right goes to big-tech and not on-site at some defense contractor? To me that's not the fault of C++.

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#49

Post by firesteelrain »

anthk wrote: post #43
firesteelrain wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language selection is no panacea for bad systems engineering or poor project management

It helps on security and correctness. Either you are a Forth like guy/gal stating how a firmware will work at every level (low, med, high, every one), cutting down every flaw by getting it as small and predictable as possible (even by ditching floats for rationals and decimal scaling), or a high level Lisp/CL/Java/C# guy with a garbage collector and some memory safety. And Java/C# and some Lisps aren't nowhere as str…

I have worked on safety crucial systems and applications that interact with safety critical systems in a non safety critical language. Each time it never had anything to do with the language and everything to do with systems engineering and project management. The projects that were successful had excellent systems engineering and project management. Language choice was never a factor.

Re: Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia

#50

Post by pjmlp »

anthk wrote: post #42
pjmlp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are on Ada 202x nowadays being discussed, and in a world where FOSS tool makers have problems making a sustainable business, always changing licenses, there are still 7 Ada vendors selling compilers.

Libre compilers do not impose restrictions on output.

As long as there are enough people around to actually work on them.
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