New version of the GNAT Pro Ada development environment

AdaCore announced GNAT Pro 6.2, the latest release of its GNAT Pro Ada development environment, available on 18 native and 28 cross platforms. It offers over 130 new features, including increased support for code coverage and source-to-object traceability, which are important for safety-critical and high-reliability application development.

As a general upgrade to the underlying technology, the GNAT Pro compiler back end is now based on GCC 4.3, which brings improved code generation, and the debug engine is now based on GDB 6.8, which provides better debugger performance. Complementing these enhancements are specific features including a more efficient implementation of stack checks, overflow checks, and validity checks, and new attributes and pragmas for use with generics. GNAT Pro 6.2 also includes features for associating pre- and post-conditions with subprograms and for selectively enabling or disabling groups of assertions.

Several existing tools have been enhanced. As an example GNATcheck, a coding standard checker, now supports additional verification rules that are especially useful to teams developing high-reliability software. GNAT Pro 6.2 has added two new tools – the GNAT Ada Java Interfacing Suite (GNAT AJIS) and GNAT Components Collection (GNATcoll). GNAT AJIS allows users to combine natively compiled Ada code with Java applications that run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), through the Java Native Interface (JNI).

Using GNAT AJIS, Java code can call natively-compiled Ada, and Ada programs can call Java, in a type-safe manner and without the need for users to write low-level JNI-based “glue” code. GNATcoll is a suite of reusable software components comprising packages that AdaCore developed for the implementation of the GNAT compiler and toolset but which are of general utility.

Also available with GNAT Pro 6.2 is GPS 4.3, the latest version of AdaCore’s extensible GNAT Programming Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). GPS 4.3 allows use of multiple versions of the same toolchain, for example an older baselined version of the GNAT Pro compiler for code generation, and a newer version of the GNAT Pro technology for code browsing. The redesigned builder module enables full customization, aiding development flexibility, and the improved documentation generator includes support for predefined and user-defined tags.

GNAT Pro 6.2 is available at $15,000.