AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada development tools and support services, today announced the release of a new major version of its GNAT Pro development environment. GNAT Pro 6.4, the latest annual release of the company’s flagship product, evidences AdaCore’s continuing commitment to regularly scheduled technology updates with new features and improvements (many based on user suggestions), support for new platforms, and integration with new tools. As with all AdaCore products, GNAT Pro is Freely-Licensed Open Source Software (FLOSS).

“In the FLOSS world, you can’t just sit on your hands, do nothing, and expect to succeed”

“In the FLOSS world, you can’t just sit on your hands, do nothing, and expect to succeed,” said Robert Dewar, AdaCore President and CEO. “You have to constantly innovate. One of the rewarding things about AdaCore is that we have been able to keep up a high pace of exciting innovation. Our regular update release of GNAT Pro 6.4, which marks the 10th anniversary of our regular release schedule, is no exception. This is a major update of the product, including significantly improved performance and major new features. When a new version of Ada is on the way, in this case Ada 2012, you don’t have to wait for the formal release to try it out. GNAT Pro 6.4 already has all the important stuff from Ada 2012, in 2011!”

The new GNAT Pro 6.4 features include the following enhancements:
• Ada 2012 preview, including most of the currently finalized Ada Issues (AIs) and in particular conditional/case/parameterized/quantified expressions, aspect specifications (including pre/postconditions and type invariants), subtype predicates, and improved support for multiprocessors
• Improved code generator based on GCC 4.5
• New switch to generate cross reference information for C and C++
• More detailed exception messages
• New rules for gnatcheck (coding standard enforcement tool)
• New warnings
• Better debugger performance
• More flexible and more efficient project manager in gnatmake/gprbuild
• More aggregates recognized as static
• Support for GNATbench 2.5 Integrated Development Environment, which will work with a new version of Eclipse

GNAT Pro 6.4 is now available for a new embedded platform, Wind River’s VxWorks MILS 2.1.x, and for updated versions of VxWorks 6 Cert (6.6.2) and SYSGO’s ElinOS (5.1). On the native side, GNAT Pro 6.4 supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on x86 (32- and 64-bit).

New tools now supported by GNAT Pro, and available separately, include GNATemulator and GNATcoverage. Used together, these are especially useful for High-Integrity applications where safety certification is required, such as DO-178B for avionics. The tools’ supported architectures include PowerPC and LEON.

GNATemulator, based on QEMU technology, offers an efficient and flexible emulator solution for Ada, C and C++ applications. It allows developers to compile code directly for their target architecture and run it on their host platform, through an approach that translates from the target object code to native instructions on the host.

The GNATcoverage tool, known earlier as XCov, performs coverage analysis on both object code (including branch coverage) and source code. Source code analysis includes both decision coverage and Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC). The tool does not require instrumentation of the executable code. Instead, the tests can be run either on a version of GNATemulator instrumented for collecting coverage data, or directly on a board with a suitable debugger interface