----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ada-Belgium is pleased to announce the program for its Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2016 on Saturday 30 January 2016 Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Solbosch Campus, Room AW1.124 Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt Laan 50, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium Organized in cooperation with Ada-Europe <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/16/160130-fosdem.html> <http://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/track/ada/> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, is a non-commercial two-day weekend event organized early each year in Brussels, Belgium. It is highly developer-oriented and brings together 5000+ participants from all over the world. The goal is to provide open source developers and communities a place to meet with other developers and projects, to be informed about the latest developments in the open source world, to attend interesting talks and presentations on various topics by open source project leaders and committers, and to promote the development and the benefits of open source solutions. The 2016 edition takes place on Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 January. It is free to attend and no registration is necessary. In this edition, Ada-Belgium organizes once more a series of presentations related to Ada and Free or Open Software in a s.c. Developer Room. The "Ada DevRoom" at FOSDEM 2016 is held on the first day of the event, Saturday 30 January 2016. Ada is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for safety- and mission-critical software engineering. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services, medical devices, etc. It is also perfectly suited for open source development. The latest Ada standard was published by ISO in December 2012. As with the prior Ada 1995 and Ada 2005 standards, the first full implementation of the new Ada 2012 standard was made available in the GNU Compiler Collection (GNAT). The Ada DevRoom aims to present the capabilities offered by the Ada language (such as object-oriented, multicore, or embedded programming) as well as some of the many exciting tools and projects using Ada. -------------------------------- Ada Developer Room Presentations (AW1.124, 59 seats) -------------------------------- The presentations in the Ada DevRoom start after the opening FOSDEM keynote. The program runs from 10:30 to 19:00, and consists of 7 hours with 11 talks/demos by 9 presenters from 5 different countries, plus 3 half-hour breaks with informal discussions. 10:30-11:00 - Arrival & Informal Discussions Feel free to arrive early, to start the day with some informal discussions while the set-up of the DevRoom is finished. 11:00-11:05 - Welcome by Dirk Craeynest - Ada-Belgium Welcome to the Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2016, which is organized by Ada-Belgium in cooperation with Ada-Europe. Ada-Belgium and Ada-Europe are non-profit organizations set up to promote the use of the Ada programming language and related technology, and to disseminate knowledge and experience into academia, research and industry in Belgium and Europe, resp. Ada-Europe has member-organizations, such as Ada-Belgium, in various countries. More information on this DevRoom is available on the Ada-Belgium web-site (see URL above). 11:05-11:55 - An Intro to Ada for Beginning and Experienced Programmers by Jean-Pierre Rosen - Adalog An overview of the main features of the Ada language, with special emphasis on those features that make it especially attractive for free software development. Ada is a feature-rich language, but what really makes Ada stand-out is that the features are nicely integrated towards serving the goals of software engineering. If you prefer to spend your time on designing elegant solutions rather than on low-level debugging, if you think that software should not fail, if you like to build programs from readily available components that you can trust, you should really consider Ada! 12:00-12:50 - Make with Ada - Small Projects to Have Fun with Ada! by Fabien Chouteau - AdaCore In this talk I will present the first 4 projects of the "Make with Ada" blog post series: a solenoid engine, an Apollo lunar lander simulator, a software synthesizer framework, and a formally proven smartwatch app. I will also explain the motivation behind this series, where we want to go, and the feedback we've got from it. 13:00-13:25 - Adopting an Ada Program - the Experience of Whitaker's Words by Martin Keegan - Unipart & Open Book Publishers I present my experiences of adopting the maintenance of Whitaker's Words, a Latin dictionary written in Ada by Col William Whitaker, who was deeply involved in the creation of Ada itself. This will be the perspective of someone from outside the Ada community who found he really liked the language, and the challenges I faced learning Ada from online materials, converting the Words source code to more idiomatic (post Ada-83) forms, adopting the tooling, accessing community support, finding collaborators, making Ada play nicely with the Web, and so on. Whitaker's Words may be one of the most widely-used pieces of Ada software, and a quick Twitter search suggests it plays a key role in helping students cheat on their Latin translation homework. As a linguist and hacker, what really interests me is the use of Ada's type system to encode Latin's grammar. 13:30-13:55 - Creating a 3D Game Engine in Windows - Lessons Learned from Doom 3 BFG by Justin Squirek Ada Doom 3 is an open source project created as both an experiment and as a serious attempt at making a Windows game engine capable of fully rendering Doom 3 assets. Engineering a complete OS media layer and 3D engine that facilitates multiple platforms presents many unique challenges. These challenges and solutions will be discussed. I will also cover how Ada aided in the process of reverse engineering the half million line Doom 3 BFG (Id Tech 4 BFG) code base and how its typing system helped steer the development of Ada Doom 3 to its current state. 14:00-14:30 - Informal Discussions A half-hour slot has been reserved for much needed interaction and informal discussion among Ada DevRoom participants and anyone potentially interested in Ada. 14:30-14:55 - Heterogeneous Parallel Computing with Ada Tasking by Jan Verschelde - University of Illinois at Chicago Consider the organization of parallel heterogeneous computations. The sequential version runs in two stages: the first stage produces jobs that can be computed independently from each other in the second stage. The producer in the first stage is executed by one task, while the other tasks compute the jobs from the second stage, as the jobs are managed by a queue, implemented by a thread safe package. This design will be illustrated with an application that involves the refactoring of code in the free and open source package PHCpack, a package to solve polynomial systems by polynomial homotopy continuation. 15:00-15:50 - Micro- and Macro-Optimizing a Distributed System by Philippe Waroquiers - Eurocontrol Or how to upload a 30000 flights simulation in 15 seconds. The Eurocontrol Flow Management System provides a simulation functionality to evaluate air traffic flow management measures (such as delay assignments or reroutings) before applying them operationally. This implies to upload a day worth of traffic in a simulation environment. This talk will describe various techniques and tools used to optimize the simulation startup time, and will discuss the gains reached via micro-optimization (among others using Valgrind) or via macro-optimization (such as using parallelism features of Ada). 16:00-16:25 - Controlling a Train Model w. GNAT GPL for Raspberry Pi 2 by Tristan Gingold - AdaCore The GNAT GPL 2015 release by AdaCore includes a cross-compiler for a new platform: Raspberry Pi 2. We have used this platform to drive and control a real model train in Ada. SPARK was used to prove absence of collisions. I will present the hardware part as well as the software part, and show a video of the model train in action. 16:30-16:55 - CrazyFlie Drone Software in SPARK Ada by Tristan Gingold - AdaCore An AdaCore intern has rewritten the CrazyFlie drone software, originally in C, into SPARK. In addition to fixing some bugs, this allowed to prove absence of runtime errors. I will present the various technics used to achieve that result, and plan to do a live demo of free fall detection. 17:00-17:50 - Memory Management with Ada 2012 by Jean-Pierre Rosen - Adalog Dynamic memory management has always been a source of trouble, and garbage collection is just a way to overcome the lack of proper memory management in many languages. This presentation shows how Ada addresses this issue in several original ways: first by requiring much less dynamic memory than other languages, and then by providing powerful tools for controlling allocation and deallocation when it is necessary. 18:00-18:25 - A Command-Line Driver Generator by Jacob Sparre Andersen - JSA Research & Innovation A tool, which can take an Ada package specification, and generate a command-line driver for calling the procedures declared in the package. Which of the procedures is called is controlled by the names of the arguments passed to the driver program. The presentation will cover: how to use the tool; and some details of how the tool works - using the Ada Semantic Interface Standard (ASIS). 18:30-19:00 - Informal Discussions & Closing Informal discussion on ideas and proposals for future events. ------------------------------- More information on Ada DevRoom ------------------------------- Speakers bios, pointers to relevant information, links to the FOSDEM site, etc., are available on the Ada-Belgium site at <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/16/160130-fosdem.html> We invite you to attend some or all of the presentations: they will be given in English. Everybody interested can attend FOSDEM 2016; no registration is necessary. We hope to see many of you there! Dirk Craeynest, FOSDEM Ada DevRoom coordinator Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be (for Ada-Belgium/Ada-Europe/SIGAda/WG9) Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm