[FOSDEM] Call for Presentations: Ada DevRoom @ FOSDEM 2025

Events
1 
                    Call for Presentations

            12th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2025

          Sunday 2 February 2025, Brussels, Belgium

www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/25/250202-fosdem.html

   Organized in cooperation with Ada-Belgium and Ada-Europe

The Ada FOSDEM community is pleased to announce the 12th edition of
the Ada DevRoom! This edition will take place on Sunday morning 2nd
of February in Belgium, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
This edition of the Ada DevRoom is once more organized in cooperation
with Ada-Belgium [1] and Ada-Europe [2].

General Information about FOSDEM

FOSDEM [3], the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European
Meeting, is a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event organized
early each year in Brussels, Belgium. It is highly developer-oriented
and brings together 8000+ participants from all over the world. No
registration nor payment is necessary.

The goal is to provide open source developers and communities a place
to meet with other developers and projects, to be informed about the
latest developments in the open source world, to attend interesting
talks and presentations on various topics by open source project
leaders and committers, and to promote the development and the
benefits of open source solutions.

Ada Programming Language and Technology

Ada is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for
embedded and mission-critical software engineering, although nowadays
it also supports object orientation, contracts and formal
verification. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail
transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services, medical
devices, etc. It is also perfectly suited for open source development
with a fully open compiler (part of GCC), a formal verification system
and a knowledgeable and vibrant community.

Awareness of safety and security issues in software systems is
increasing. The NSA recently published [4] a list of programming
languages that are recommended for the development of new software due
to their memory safety and Ada was one of the list (one of the three
compiled non-garbage collected languages!). In that context, it
should be no surprise that NVIDIA has started using Ada/SPARK [5, 6]
for their highest critical parts in their GPUs! The forums [7] have
also seen an uptick of new users since the NSA announcement.

Multi-core platforms are now abundant and small, embedded devices are
growing exponentially. These are some of the reasons that the Ada
programming language and technology attracts more and more attention
due to Ada’s support for programming by contract, performant and
efficient code, high- and low-level abstractions and support for
multi-core targets. The latest Ada language definition, Ada 2022, was
approved by ISO as an international standard last year. Work on
implementing the new features is ongoing, such as improved support for
fine-grained parallelism, which were introduced in the new standard.
The Ada-related technology, SPARK, provides a complete solution for
the safety and security aspects stated above while being fully open
source, making it stand out from other formal verification tools, as
Ada/SPARK code is compiled directly into ready-to-run programs, which
can even run on embedded systems.

More and more tools are available, many are open source, including for
small and modern platforms. Interest in Ada keeps increasing, also in
the open source community, from which many exciting projects have been
started.

Ada Developer Room

FOSDEM is an ideal fit for an Ada Developer Room. On the one hand, it
gives the general open source community an opportunity to see what is
happening in the Ada community and how Ada can help produce reliable
and efficient open source software. On the other hand, it gives open
source Ada projects an opportunity to present themselves, get feedback
and ideas, and attract participants to their project and collaboration
between projects.

At previous FOSDEM events, the Ada-Belgium non-profit organization
organized successful Ada Developer Rooms, offering a full day program
in 2006 [8], a two-day program in 2009 [9], and full day programs in
2012-2016 [10-14], in 2018-2020 [15-17] and 2022 [18]. An important
goal is to present exciting Ada technology and projects, including
people outside the traditional Ada community. This edition is no
different.

Call for Presentations

We would like to schedule technical presentations, tutorials, demos,
live performances, project status reports, discussions, etc, in the
Ada Developer Room.

Do you have a talk you want to give?
Do you have a project you would like to present?
Would you like to get more people involved with your project?
Would you like to share some knowledge and lessons about Ada?

The Ada DevRoom organizers call on you to:

  • discuss and help organize the details, subscribe to the Ada-FOSDEM
    mailing list [19];
  • for bonus points, be a speaker: the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list is the
    place to be!
  • don’t hesitate to propose a topic that you would like to present to
    the community, we are eager to know what you have in store for us!

We’re inviting proposals that are related to Ada software development,
and include a technical oriented discussion. You’re not limited to
slide presentations, of course. Be creative. Propose something fun
to share with people so they might feel some of your enthusiasm for
Ada!

Speaking slots should be around 20 or 50 minutes, plus 5 or 10 minutes
for Q&A. However, this schedule is flexible and we will adapt it to
other formats. For example, a short technical talk can be transformed
into a 10 minutes talk, plus time for Q&A. Depending on interest, we
might also have a session with lightning presentations (e.g. 5 minutes
each), and/or an informal discussion session.

Note that all talks will be streamed live and recorded (audio+video).
By submitting a proposal, you agree to being recorded and streamed.
You also agree that the contents of your talk will be published under
the same license as all FOSDEM content, a Creative Commons (CC-BY)
license.

Submission Guidelines

Your proposal must be submitted to the FOSDEM Pretalx system [20]. If
you already had an account from previous years, reuse it; if not,
create a new account. If, for whatever reason, you cannot use
Pretalx, you can also submit your proposal by messaging the Ada-FOSDEM
mailing list [15]. If needed, feel free to contact us at the
Ada-FOSDEM Mailing list or at <irvise (at) irvise.xyz> (without
spaces).

Please, fill the information asked by the Pretalx system, which
includes:

  • your name, affiliation, contact info;
  • the title of your talk (be descriptive and creative);
  • a short descriptive and attractive abstract;
  • preferred duration of your talk;
  • pointers to more information if applicable;
  • a short bio and photo.

See programs of previous Ada DevRooms (URLs below) for presentation
examples, as well as for the kind of info we need.

Here is the slightly flexible schedule that we will follow:

  • November 30, 2024: end of the submission period. Remember, we only
    need the information in the list above. You do not have to submit
    the entire talk by this date. Try to submit your proposal as early
    as possible. It is better to submit half of the details early than
    be late, so do not wait for the last minute.
  • December 15, 2024: announcement of accepted talks.
  • January 15, 2025: your slides should be uploaded to the Pretalx
    platform.
  • February 2, 2025: Ada-DevRoom day!

We look forward to lots of feedback and proposals!

Regards,

The Ada-FOSDEM team
Main organiser: Fernando Oleo Blanco <irvise (at) irvise.xyz>
Second in command: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest (at) cs.kuleuven.be>
Third in command: A.J. Ianozi <aj (at) ianozi.com>

[1] The Ada-Belgium Organization
[2] https://www.ada-europe.org
[3] https://fosdem.org
[4] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-releases-guidance-on-how-to-protect-against-software-memory-safety-issues/
[5] NVIDIA: Adoption of SPARK Ushers in a New Era in… | AdaCore
[6] When Formal Verification with SPARK is the… | The AdaCore Blog
[7] https://forum.ada-lang.io/
[8] Ada at the Free and Open-Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2006)
[9] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2009)
[10] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2012)
[11] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2013)
[12] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2014)
[13] Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2015
[14] Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2016
[15] 8th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2018
[16] 9th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2019
[17] 10th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2020
[18] 11th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2022
[19] http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html
[20] FOSDEM 2025 :: pretalx

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Hey everyone, this is very exciting! I just wanted to say, this is it! This is our time to shine!

I’ll be submitting my presentation request either over the weekend or early next week.

Remember, even if you don’t have a full presentation yet, if you want to present, be sure to fill this out. They’re due at the end of November.

You can use the FOSDEM 2025 :: pretalx link to submit and you can save your draft while you work on it.

I’m really excited to see what people come up with :slight_smile:

3 Likes
3

On this topic…

I have a couple of ideas that I could talk about (most likely only one of those two, since I do not want to monopolize the room):

  1. Something along the lines “Major Ada developments in the past few years”
    1.1 It would cover topics such as Ada 2022, SPARK gaining the ability of proving memory correctness, ala Rust; SPARK gaining exception proves; Alire, etc.
    1.2 It would be a fairly short talk to show the public that Ada is very alive and kicking!
  2. Or another idea, along the lines of “Understanding complex and advance programming concepts with Ada”
    2.1 It would cover Liquid types (logicaly qualified types), contracts, proves (SPARK) and maybe I would also do an embedded bit with Ada (abstracting registers and so on).
    2.2 This would show people how advance Ada is and also help them learn this very interesting topics that major languages are not touching as their design is not ready for it or people think it is just too complex.

Best,
Fer

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If anyone has spent time playing with this then it might be interesting (not useful to me right now but would still be interesting).

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It might be worth talking about how to get Ada into the Linux kernel as a better route than rust, especially after all the recent reports of Linux devs not getting on board with it. Getting Ada into the Linux kernel could help it’s false image perpetuated by c and c++ programmers.

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I was thinking about giving some kind of lightning talk on how to go from having nothing Ada-related on your computer to writing, building, and compiling your first Ada program in less than 5 minutes (I just timed it with Getada and it took me 2 on the macbook).

I really like this idea.

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I don’t know if SPARK got a lot more powerful or easier with the improvements, but I tried it again recently and wrote an identifier and number parser which provably terminates. I had a lot of trouble doing even simple things with it in the past.

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Maybe do that in the Linux room, just wear armour.

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I can imaging. Proving termination in SPARK is a huge pain… AFAIK, SPARK has not become easier to use, it has become more complete. So, for example, now one can do dynamic memory management in SPARK or throw exceptions and handle them outside of the function/procedure that generated them. So in that regard, it has become more flexible and capable: things that in the past were forbidden or required a workaround, no longer do. But the complexity is still there…

11

I heard we didn’t have any presentations submitted (last weekish maybe)? Is that still an ongoing thing? Just asking in case so it brings some visibility to the forums if we still need more.

12

Proposals are very often submitted very late, which always makes the organisers nervous… :wink:

That said, we received some proposals by now, but certainly would like to get more. So all of you: if you can tell something about a tool, library, application, technique, case study, experience, etc., that is potentially interesting for FOSDEM, submit a proposal for the Ada DevRoom.

Note that proposals are just that: info about a potential presentation, NOT the presentation itself. There’s time to prepare that after the submission deadline. For now, only a small amount of work is needed to submit.

You have until the end of November, less than one week from now. But don’t delay: please submit sooner, rather than later.

Dirk

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A direct link to the submission of the proposals :slight_smile: FOSDEM 2025 :: pretalx

1 Like