In this article, Fabien Chouteau from AdaCore explains the importance of secure software in the emerging telecommunications industry.
Ada is a modern programming language used by development teams around the world to build critical systems. It stands out for helping teams detect and eliminate defects early in the software lifecycle, when fixes are least costly. Ada supports the creation of reliable, safe, and secure software without compromising performance, making it well suited for demanding, real-time applications.
The history of Ada
Ada was initially developed in the early 1980s (commonly referred to as Ada 83) under the direction of Dr. Jean Ichbiah at CII-Honeywell-Bull in France. The language was revised and extended in a backwards-compatible way in the early 1990s by a team led by Tucker Taft at Intermetrics in the United States, resulting in Ada 95 — the first ISO-standardized object-oriented language. Subsequent maintenance and enhancements produced Ada 2005, which was issued as an amendment to the standard. Ada 2012 introduced full support for contract-based programming, including preconditions and postconditions for subprograms, improving correctness and expressiveness. The most recent standard, Ada 2022, focused on usability and readability improvements while preserving the language’s strong safety and reliability characteristics.
The name “Ada” honors Augusta Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), often regarded as the world’s first programmer for her work with Charles Babbage. She was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.
Precision in telecoms
Quality of Service is increasingly critical across public and private 5G, Wi‑Fi, and satellite networks. Many emerging applications require highly accurate latency measurements to function properly, creating demand for specialized tools that can quantify and analyze delay with precision.
LatenceTech, a Canadian telecom startup, specializes in high-precision network latency measurement tools for 5G and IoT environments. Faced with the challenge of turning quantitative latency data into actionable strategies for improving QoS and customer experience, LatenceTech used GNAT Pro for Ada to build compact, efficient, and deterministic network tools that meet real-time telecom requirements.
Ada provides several advantages for projects of this kind. GNAT Pro produces small, fast executables that are ideal for embedded and real-time systems. Ada’s explicit and readable coding style enhances maintainability and team collaboration. The language simplifies low-level data handling by allowing precise naming and layout of record fields, avoiding cumbersome bit-manipulation common in other languages. Ada also offers built-in support for synchronization and concurrency while maintaining the performance benefits of native compilation, helping developers implement robust, predictable network measurement tools.
As digital connectivity becomes ever more integral to industry and daily life, Ada remains a compelling choice for developers who need to balance safety, security, and performance. Its continued evolution and adoption in telecommunications and related fields can help advance system capability while upholding rigorous standards of software quality. For teams building the next generation of network instrumentation and services, Ada is a practical and proven option that supports innovation without sacrificing reliability.
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