Advanced Ada Programming (with Basic Spark)

Duration: 3 Days

Description

This advanced, hands-on course is designed for experienced Ada developers who want to deepen their expertise in high-integrity, high-performance development. Participants will explore advanced topics including formal verification techniques, SPARK Ada for provable correctness, low-level systems programming, advanced concurrency and real-time scheduling, and performance tuning for resource-constrained environments. Through in-depth labs and real-world scenarios, learners will strengthen their ability to design and deliver Ada systems that meet the strictest safety and reliability standards used in aerospace, defense, and other mission-critical industries.

Audience

This course is designed for experienced Ada developers and engineers building safety-critical, real-time, or high-reliability systems. It’s ideal for those who have completed an intermediate Ada course or have equivalent experience and are ready to work with advanced verification, concurrency, and performance techniques in production environments.

Objectives

•   Design and implement advanced concurrent architectures
•   Apply Ravenscar-aligned design considerations and predictability
•   Use representation clauses and low-level features safely
•   Manage dynamic memory using controlled types and storage pools
•   Interface Ada with C/C++ and reason about data layout
•   Apply contracts and defensive programming for verification
•   Understand SPARK’s goals, restrictions, and workflow
•   Write SPARK-friendly code and interpret basic proof results
•   Integrate static analysis into the development process
•   Complete a capstone exercise combining advanced Ada with SPARK

Prerequisites

Participants should have completed an Intermediate Ada course or have equivalent experience.

Course Outline

•   Module 1: Advanced Language Review for Large Systems
•   Scaling packages and hierarchies (subsystems, child packages)
•   Visibility, private/limited types, and encapsulation strategies
•   Initialization/finalization patterns and large-build considerations
•   Module 2: Advanced Concurrency Design Patterns
•   Task vs protected-object tradeoffs
•   Common patterns: worker pools, pipelines, active objects
•   Selective accept patterns and timeouts
•   Avoiding deadlocks and priority inversions