Ada SPARK Office Hours

General
1

Hello,

The community already operates a very active Monthly Meetup, typically during the weekend. Very worthwhile to attend if you have not done so, last one was in April and I have not seen the announcement for May yet. Recording and textual summaries are posted after the event.

The Monthly Meetup is full of useful content as to ongoing projects in the community, pointers to information and the like.

Inspired by this, we are starting a complementary community event called ‘Ada SPARK Office Hours’, link is here: Ada SPARK Office Hours | AdaCore

Goal of this event is to serve as a resource for developers that have questions around Ada and SPARK, Alire, Ada and LLMs, getting started, embedded hardware boards and the like. It will be initially staffed by @ohenley and myself.

We will be online during these office hours and are happy to answer any Ada SPARK related questions you may have.

So if you are:

  • A student learning about Ada and have questions
  • A student working on a Capstone project and need some guidance
  • A hobbyist wanting to learn about Ada and how it encourages safe and secure programming
  • A professional software developer and want to brainstorm ideas

We are here to help! Registration is not required, there is a Google Meet link on the webpage above. You can drop in from the beginning, or halfway through the meeting, whatever works for you.

The first Office Hours will be on Friday, May 22nd, 10am-11am EDT and after that, we will be live every 2 weeks:

Friday, May 22, 2026
Friday, June 5, 2026
Friday, July 3, 2026
Friday, July 17, 2026
Friday, July 31, 2026
Friday, August 14, 2026

Feel free to drop in anytime during that time slot, our virtual doors are open!

Regards,

Mark

2

Is there Google Calendar to subscribe to?

3

Thanks for the question:

Seems like copying a link is more complicated than it appears.

The only way I can work out how to do this is with an ICS file.

Thanks,

Mark

4

Your link to calendar is https://workspace.google.com/intl/en-US/products/calendar/, right? It doesn’t look like a particular calendar of events :thinking:

5

Yeah, someone my copy-paste does not work.

6

I have a dedicated calendar for online Ada events (iCal link) I’ll try to keep it actual. Everyone could subscribe on it, I guess.

7

Thank you very much!

8

The forum is supposed to be able to display an event in a calendar.

I’ve only found the following. Maybe it requires being in the Events subforum? In any case, you can at least do this. It is converted to the user’s local time:

2026-05-22T14:00:00Z→2026-05-22T15:00:00Z

In the toolbar, press + and then “Insert date / time”
Source:
[date-range from=2026-05-22T10:00:00 to=2026-05-22T11:00:00 timezone=EST5EDT]

(I don’t know if EST5EDT is equivalent to EDT, but it matches my expectation after conversion to my local time).

For what I mean for an event in a calendar, see Ada Monthly Meetup, 25th of April 2026

9

Not sure if I have access to add something to the forum calendar, I can’t find it.

However, we were able to get an ICS added to the page on Ada SPARK Office Hours | AdaCore

Clicking ‘Join us’ now downloads an ICS.

Thanks for all the input!

11

May 22, 2026

We had our first office hour last Friday with a strong showing and a great discussion.

We had @ohenley @damaki, @DirkCraeynest and myself to provide guidance and suggestions and 2 callers with questions and looking for guidance. I did not ask for permission to share their names and company, so I’ll leave it to them to comment if they desire to. Will ask next time.

One caller works in a technology company in the distributed sensor network field. They are already using Ada and looking to move up to SPARK. They use the newer language versions of Ada, VS Code, dockerized environments and Alire.

The second caller was a computer science student who recently started with Ada and is building an Air Traffic Control application.

There was one additional caller that had some audio issues and was never able to join and one that emailed during the session for the link, they will join next time.

There was some discussion about how to properly abstract runtime, BSP and device abstractions on ST Micro boards, specifically the F4 series of boards. There is some work ongoing to provide a better series of abstraction crates to make porting applications between different boards easier.

During the session there was lots of talk as to LLMs and which LLMs people prefer as well as a bit of discussion on agentic AI. People realize that AI is a great accelerator (though it can make silly mistakes), but there is some unease on the impact of future learning and personal development. At the same time, it allows people to work at higher levels of abstraction.

There was a discussion on using skills as well to make it easier to lift from Ada to SPARK as well as concert from C to Ada: GitHub - AdaCore/skills · GitHub. One person asked about how to do unit testing in Alire and interestingly the GNATtest skill was released very recently to address that.

Couple of references from the session that others may be interested in:

Great discussion, thanks for the people that attending. The next Ada SPARK Office Hours will be on June 5th, 10-11am EDT, invite information is below and there is an .ICS file on Ada SPARK Office Hours | AdaCore .

Ada SPARK Office Hours
Friday, June 5 · 10:00 – 11:00
Time zone: America/Toronto
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/tgu-wyof-cpq
Or dial: ‪(CA) +1 647-734-2328‬ PIN: ‪500 273 407‬#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/tgu-wyof-cpq?pin=9982233093577

12

Arg, I missed it. I will try to tune in to other ones for sure. Thanks for the summary!

13

Next office hours will be tomorrow, June 5th, 10-11am EDT. Details and links in the parent article.

14

We had a great office hour session on June 5th, with Daniel King, Fernando Olea, Maxim Reznik, Vadim Godunko, Etiuenne Coulouma, Goncalo Caselhos, Olivier Henley, Alejandro R. Mosteo and Ibrahim Sory Diallo in attendance.

It was a nice share on experiences with device drivers. After the initial welcome Olivier started a discussion on his new generic device driver model. He is working with a lot of academic users of Ada that are building Capstone projects on embedded hardware.

He extensively uses generics in his device model. In other words, he creates a generic I2C driver that can then be implemented for the specific I2C driver for a device and then used in specific SoCs, that can then be used in specific boards (such as the ST Micro F4 series). Olivier favours this approach over the current HAL approach as it allows him more flexibility and he does not have to bring in the entire HAL.

The HAL approach will work very well for bareboard HAL crates, but may fall appart in larger Zephyr type applications with a lot more device access.

Lots of discussion on the topic, it would seem that his approach could nicely fit underneath the current HAL model, certainly something to try.

There was some discussion on generics including some additional code and some concerns about runtime performance, as always happens in embedded scenarios.

We also spent some time explaining what a runtime really is and what separates the runtime from an actual HAL. The runtime really is the bare minimum required to get programs running on a board. Think interrupt handler, memory setup, those types of things. It is generally more processor architecture related with slight modifications for different SoC and boards. The HAL handles devices such as I2C, SPI, USB, you name it.

It was a lively discussion and I certainly learned quite a bit, as did many of the community participants.

The next Office Hours will be on June 19th. Details here: Ada SPARK Office Hours | AdaCore

One of the topics I want to suggest for that discussion is how people are using AI with Ada and SPARK, also based on @Irvise 's post on the Forum as a reply to the topic How to easily use AI Skills with your Ada projects - #9 by Irvise

15

Too bad I missed it. Seems to be interesting input for Towards a HAL for multiple runtimes

Do you plan to continue with that topic?