Alejandro Mosteo

Ada 2022 is around the corner with many goodies in the form of new features and featurettes. Arguably small syntax sugar additions combine for the programmer's comfort, like for example user-defined literals and container aggregates, that allow natural initialization of user-defined containers with the same expressions used for basic arrays since the beginnings of Ada. In this talk, I discuss how these features allow the initialization of a container data type for heterogeneous values (a-la JSON) without the need of crutch functions (like the usual "+"). Such an structure could be used for compiled-in definitions but, more ambitiously, a relatively simple parser for a strict subset of Ada could leverage this data structure for natural-looking (to the Ada programmer) configuration files. Such configuration files could be useful for tools that are strictly Ada-oriented, written by and for Ada programmers.

At FOSDEM 2020 we presented the first version of Alire, the package manager for the Ada Open Source ecosystem. Two years later, the tools and its ecosystem have evolved, in some instances based on the feedback received at FOSDEM. So we want to give you an update on the new features and improvements, including:

• Pin system: intended to help with the development and use of WIP crates.
• Crate configuration: that enables static code generation before compilation.
• Toolchains: that enable easy installation of [cross-]compiler and builder versions.
• Auto GPR with: for automatic “with”ing of dependencies.
• Etc.

We will also have a look at the ecosystem of crates available in the Alire community index.

Alire (Ada LIbrary REpository) is a package manager project for the Ada/SPARK community. The goal of a package manager is to facilitate collaboration within the community and to lower the barrier of entry for beginners.

In this talk we will present the Alire project, what it can do for you and how you can contribute and give more visibility to your Ada/SPARK projects.

We will also provide a tutorial to show how to use Alire to create a library and then publish it for others to use.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the chief frameworks for service robotics research and development. The next iteration of this framework, ROS2, aims to improve critical shortcomings of its predecessor like deterministic memory allocation and real-time characteristics.

RCLAda is a binding to the ROS2 framework that enables the programming of ROS2 nodes in pure Ada with seamless integration into the ROS2 workflow.