welcome to run time recruitment
this is Lance today we can talk about
programming languages for
microcontrollers when I was a student at
University I had to study quite a number
of different programming languages my
focus was primarily on assembler I did a
lot of assembly work mainly with the z80
like a controller microprocessor and
then onto c c an assembler were the two
primary programming languages that I
used a university and also in my place
of work when I was an engineer however I
did study Pascal ADA
Lisp and Prolog my focus was primarily
around the embedded programming very
systems development space which which
were really assemble in C Pascal though
was a very very type cast and very good
language particularly wanted to reduce
the number of bugs because if the
compiler insisted on type checking the
source code to ensure that rays went on
our range and there were lots of other
checks that were done by the compiler to
make sure that the programmer wrote the
code in a correct syntax to reduce the
errors and bugs now ADA was actually an
offspring of Pascal it is a statically
typed language it's a structured
language it's a and it's also
object-oriented it also has task
management built into the programming
language so Ada was originally used and
nearly still being used there definitely
for mission-critical applications in the
military and control systems in general
it normally runs in the past on more
like 16 to 32-bit microprocessor micro
controllers so you couldn't run it on
smaller smaller microcontrollers because
of the 8 bit controllers because the
compilers were not really efficient
enough with the code size nowadays with
ARM Cortex it is now more and more
easier because you can buy ARM Cortex
very very cheaply pennies in the pound
Ada language is now able to
we utilize on these microcontrollers I'm
going to show you guys today a couple of
different ways that you can run ADA code
on microcontrollers there's actually a
company called AdaCore that provides
open-source tools to allow you to run
software to write ADA code and run it on
ARM based cortex microcontrollers
if you to really look at the maintenance
side of programming particularly you've
deployed a program into the market in
your system into the market you you
don't want to have return items you
don't you want to have the least amount
of defects when it comes to bugs in your
software so if you can be as robust as
you can with your programming from the
outset with using the right tools to
develop the software you're going to
have less time spent in maintenance
mafic cost is going to be reduced so I
urge you all to have a look at the ADA
programming language as a possible
programming language for your next
project if you're building around the
ARM Cortex microcontrollers so they have
a whole swag of different products here
for different types of microcontrollers
from the 8 bit to 32 and 64-bit market
processes so there you can have one for
8-bit so there's no real excuse why you
can't use ADA now even in your 8-bit
microcontroller based project give it a
go check it out there is open source
software that they have provided if you
want to give it a go but I urge you to
have a go and think about possibly using
the ADA core set of programming tools
they also GNU tools out there as
well I think the freighter check it out
they got compilers and tool sets they've
got even mixed language development so
you can mix up they what they do is they
can mix ADA with C++ and Python sweg of
different programming languages that can
be mixed together depending on what you
want to do with the language there's a
native support for certain embedded
environments there's also static
analysis they even do static analysis
tools so you can check the output of the
actual code from the compilers through
the static analysis tools to make sure
that there
you know the compilers are doing what
they should be doing so check that out
and also there's a couple other videos
I'm going to be linking to that you want
to check out particularly one video
which can compare C++ syntax for the
hello world program and also the ADA
syntax and shows you the differences so
I think you should guys to check it out
it's an interesting time that we live in
I think we should be experimenting with
different types of languages not to
stick to the the well and
tried-and-tested languages like C I mean
I'm a great supporter of C and also
assembler but I think ADA is a very very
good option for security-critical
software development particularly in
this day and age of high security and
and the IOT area IOT is going to require
a huge amount more of security-conscious
programming so ada may actually play a
big role in that particular type of
industry so check it out guys
and you're an embedded engineer looking
for a new opportunity connect with me
and my team please on LinkedIn or check
out our web site at
www.runtimerec.com and click
with me Lance Harvie on LinkedIn and
we're more than happy to help you out I
hope this should be has been useful have
yourself a great day thank you
