Once again the Ada language merited a large room at FOSDEM. On Febrary 1, a series of talks took place in the Ada Devroom, ending with a presentation about the DragonLace project and future plans.

All of presentations were video recorded, and the presentations have been uploaded to the AdaEurope-Belgium site. The DragonLace Presentation is available in PDF and ODP formats. It discusses the latest state of Ports and Pkgsrc support as well as some potential future work.

FreeBSD ports continue to be updated. Yesterday "devel/sdl_gnat" port was added. This is the re-packaging of the thin bindings to SDL that arrived in GNAT GPL 2013, and as such they are also licensed with the full GPLv3. As a result, the port "devel/adasdl" will be removed in 6 weeks for several reasons, including that it does not build on amd64/x86-64.

A current list of Ada ports in FreeBSD is as follows (R.U. = Recently Updated):

Of note:

• GnatDroid is now based on gcc-4.7, but it still has the Android 2.3 API. It may be time to update the API to 4.4.
• Matreshka lost the FireBird SQL driver due to code incompatible with GCC 4.7. Either a patch or upgrade in GCC will fix
• There are additional ports but they are not marked with needing Ada to build. Frankly they may not work. Slowly these will be identified, and then fixed or removed
• DragonFly BSD uses FreeBSD ports too, so whatever is available on FreeBSD is also available on DragonFly

There was a port in FreeBSD called "devel/adabooch" which installed the 2003 version of the Ada95 Booch components. There was no building done, only the source files were installed. Ada95 Booch is actually well-maintained at SourceForge by Simon Wright and Martin Krischik. The latest version came out in March 2013.

FreeBSD now builds this version, including a full library and standard .gpr support, and should be in great shape now.

FreeBSD has PLplot, cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots, at the latest stable version 5.10.0 (as of today). What it did not have is the option to build the Ada bindings although most other languages were available as an option. Rather than update the currently unmaintained PLplot port, I created a new port at math/plplot-ada to build the Ada bindings separately.

In separate news, the Ada bindings to ncurses were completely revamped. Previously the port didn't actually build the library. Now it does and it should work as expected. The port is located at devel/adacurses.

The Spark/Ada-based Ironsides DNS server just arrived to FreeBSD ports. I believe it is currently unavailable on all other platforms. Ironsides has the potential to be a showcase for Ada so I'm glad to give it exposure and chance to be used on a great server platform. From it's website:

IRONSIDES is an authoritative DNS server that is provably invulnerable to many of the problems that plague other servers. It achieves this property through the use of formal methods in its design, in particular the language Ada and the SPARK formal methods tool set. Code validated in this way is provably exception-free, contains no data flow errors, and terminates only in the ways that its programmers explicitly say that it can. These are very desirable properties from a computer security perspective.

IRONSIDES is not a complete implementation of DNS. In particular, it does not support zone transfers or recursive queries. It does, however, support a sufficient number of DNS records to be useful as an authoritative DNS server for an enterprise.