Every Rolls-Royce gas turbine FADEC runs ADA binaries on a custom processor [1].
It's also used extensively at Airbus. Lots of DO-178C (safety critical aerospace).
1: https://www.his-conference.co.uk/session/visiumcore-a-high-i...
The Ada mandate for mission-critical software was only in place from 1991-1997.
"NVIDIA began implementing SPARK in its security strategy in 2019 on select pieces of firmware. They began training additional personnel in SPARK and eventually developed an in-house training program.
Several NVIDIA teams are now using SPARK for a wide range of applications that include image authentication and integrity checks for the overall GPU firmware image, BootROM and secure monitor firmware, and formally verified components of an isolation kernel for an embedded operating system, to name just a few."[0]
https://www.adacore.com/nvidia
[0] https://www.wevolver.com/article/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-us...
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
because... they don't have as many examples, documentation, textbooks, or public example projects to base generation off of, perhaps. There may be a future where documentation/servers are more formally integrated with LLMs/AI systems in a way that makes up for the relative lack of literature by plugging into a source of information that can be used to generate code/projects.
If the pool is smaller but from say experienced programmers then the number of errors might be less. I can see that for Ada however most Haskell is probably written by undergraduates just learning it so not a quality code base.
I think Apple researchers published a recent papaer where they had a LLM giving good Swidt code but the original corpus only included one Swift program but the AI model was tuned by experienced Swift programmers to get into a good stae for general use.
Ada’s strictness about types and a preference to allocate on the stack rather than the heap means more bugs are caught at compile time. Claude Code is really good at iterating on compile time errors without much user intervention.
I'm pretty sure these aren't big issues these days, but there's still a lot of people walking around thinking "I can't use Ada on this project, I don't have budget for a commercial compiler." Maybe a "project manager's introduction to Ada." I would write it myself, but I've forgotten most everything I learned about the language and it's development community.
[Apart from that... young engineers should definitely check out Ada, even if you don't eventually use it. Why it was considered a good idea to create a new language, the problems language designers were trying to solve and how developers used the language to build code that was more bullet-proof than C++ is kind of an interesting story.]
All Ada language features are present in the free/open source version of the compiler. The proprietary version of GNAT is just updated more frequently I think and has commercial support - they periodically copy their changes into the main GCC source tree.
They have proprietary tools for some kinds of static analysis, but those wouldn’t be considered language features. GNATprove (the theorem prover tool for verifying SPARK programs) is open source.
https://blog.adacore.com/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source...
I never heard about Spark/Ada before. I wonder if anyone uses Spark for real world tasks, and if yes, what for?
eggy•5h ago