Aerospace Defence

AdaCore introduces GNAT Pro for Wind River Helix Virtualisation Platform

Posted 25 November 2020

AdaCore today launched a new edition of its premier GNAT Pro Ada, C and C++ development toolsuites in support of the Wind River Helix Virtualisation Platform.

Image courtesy AdaCore

Offered in separate Ada and C/C++ packages, GNAT Pro enhances Helix Platform's ability to consolidate mixed-criticality aerospace, defence and automotive applications onto a scalable, agile and certifiable platform.

Using GNAT Pro will allow Helix Platform customers to experience a consistent software development toolchain across each of their Helix Platform partitions and target architectures, thereby helping to reduce overall development and training costs.

The consistency offered by GNAT Pro comes from the bundling of AdaCore's development tools for Wind River VxWorks 7, Wind River Linux, and Bare Metal processors. This gives customers the freedom and flexibility to choose the best option for their Helix Platform’s safety, security and innovation partitions. For example, developers of Ada and C applications with safety-certification requirements like DO-178C can choose to use either a stripped-down, minimal environment through a Bare Metal partition, or a Wind River VxWorks Cert Edition partition with POSIX, ARINC 653 and real-time operating system capabilities. Non-safety partitions can take full advantage of the power of Ada, C and C++ on Wind River VxWorks 7 and Wind River Linux to provide rapid and cost-effective innovation and deployment for non-safety-critical applications on their system.

“GNAT Pro supports both the maintenance of existing critical codebases and the development of new modern applications,” said Jamie Ayre, Commercial Director at AdaCore. “This, combined with our longstanding partnership with Wind River, makes GNAT Pro a natural development environment for the Helix Virtualisation Platform. It allows innovation to run alongside existing systems, and offers an easy and low-cost migration path for applications running on top of Wind River products, such as VxWorks or VxWorks 653.”

“As systems become smarter and more connected, especially with the advent of the intelligent edge, a modern and flexible development journey that can support increasingly complex requirements will be essential in order to help teams bring next generation mission critical systems to market,” said Alex Wilson, Senior Director, Aerospace and Defense Industry Solutions, Wind River. “Together with AdaCore, Wind River is delivering expanded solutions to enable development environments that ensure successful deployment of safe and secure systems.”