Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas

Worked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s. I worked on exactly one Ada project. The rest were C/C++. I presume the shift away from Ada has accelerated if anythinng.

This might be a US/EU difference. It's pretty popular in the EU still, although some of the market has been taken by various Simulink to C tools.

Every Rolls-Royce gas turbine FADEC runs ADA binaries on a custom processor [1].

It's also used extensively at Airbus. Lots of DO-178C (safety critical aerospace).

1: https://www.his-conference.co.uk/session/visiumcore-a-high-i...

I worked in that industry and never saw a single project using Ada, but I've always been fascinated by different programming languages.

The DOD mandate was very short-lived, and many projects sought and received exemptions to it. So it's not surprising that, at that time, you only saw one project.

> Worked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s.

The Ada mandate for mission-critical software was only in place from 1991-1997.

Thank you for sharing this! I'd love to know more about what led them to develop their own CPU, and what the instruction set looks like. It looks like AdaCore actually merged their support for VISIUMCore into upstream GCC. The slides state it features SEU detection/correction, which is pretty interesting.

Seems to be standard in India as well. E.g. the newly announced made in India space microprocessor is targeted by an in house Ada compiler: https://thestateindia.com/2025/09/02/vikram-3201-india-unvei...

There are enough commercial projects to keep 7 vendors in business, in a day and age where many devs refuse to pay for their tools.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

One interesting project is Saab Gripen jet fighter, whose entire software stack (other than software that is treated as "black box" firmware of certain physical components) is written in Ada, and AFAIK every sale includes complete source code and SDK to make modifications.