Profile I Cyrille Comar
An engineering company at heart
Neil Tyler meets Cyrille Comar, the co-founder and Managing Director of Adacore Europe and one of the key driving forces behind the development of Ada 95
I
n between visits to the Paris International Air Show and attending an Adacore round table discussion on new standards in Edinburgh, CIE got the chance to talk to Cyrille Comar, one of the co-founders and Managing Director of AdaCore Europe. Comar is one of the key architects of the GNAT compilation technology and was responsible for leading the implementation of Ada 95 and the GNAT library model. Ada is a programming language that was designed for long-lived applications where reliability and efficiency are seen as being essential. It was originally developed back in the 1980s (the original version was known as Ada 83) by a team led by Dr. Jean Ichbiah at CII-Honeywell-Bull in France. The language was revised and enhanced in the early 1990s which resulted in the launch of Ada 95, which became the first internationally standardised (ISO) Object- Oriented Language. Further revisions were completed to the standard and this version of the language is known as Ada 2005. Additional features are currently under development and are expected to be completed in 2012. Born in Paris Comar holds Masters and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Universite Marie et Pierre Curie. I met him for lunch in a hotel in central Edinburgh
18 September 2011
and while he’s quietly spoken his passion for the Ada language on which he’s worked for almost 20 years is striking. “It’s a language that is seeing significant usage worldwide in a host of high-integrity, safety-critical and high-security end markets such as commercial and military aircraft avionics, air traffic control, railroad systems, and medical devices. It’s also a great teaching language and it has been the subject of significant university research especially in the area of real-time technologies. AdaCore has a long history with the Ada programming language. “Invented in the early 1980s it came as a
response to growing concerns from the US Department of Defense over what it perceived as a software crisis i.e. there were too many different languages in use. The development of Ada was seen as a solution to that problem. It was a language that was devised to meet a stringent set of requirements and that could then be used effectively by everyone working in the defence space. As is often the case after a while it fell out of favour, to some extent; the language was perceived as being too difficult for the time and the available tools weren’t that good. In the early 1990s the language went into a decline, C++ was born and as a language that began to take
Components in Electronics
a larger part of the available market. Hence the development of Ada 95 and the further revisions we’ve seen over the years.” For many users of Ada the benefits are obvious. You get better software faster than with competitor languages and the support it provides makes it suitable for a host of complex real-time software designs.
Second wind The growing competition from languages like C++ and the criticism of Ada at the time resulted in the first set of revisions. Work began in the early 1990s with the intention of re-inventing a language and a set of development tools which the community could then play with and ultimately use to manage future changes more effectively. “I was a professor in France at the time when I first heard of the project which was to ultimately lead to the setting up of Adacore. I applied for a position with it and was asked to go over to New York University to get involved in developing these new tools. I had initially planned to go for eight months but ended up staying for three years. I loved New York and fell in love with the technology. “The project was so successful that we effectively gave Ada a second lease of life.
There were some concerns raised about the role of a university in developing the language but those were addressed when it was decided that the software would be made free. In turn people were keen to see what was essentially a university research project turned into a business opportunity, led by a real company - hence the creation of Adacore in the US.” Adacore was set up in 1994, one year
before the ending of the project, while Adacore Europe was established in 1996. What was unique about the company when it was first set up was that the software was free.
“Ours is a subscription model,” Comar explains. “When we set ourselves up that kind of model had never been thought of before. It was seen as a very novel approach at the time but now it has become the norm. Trust is at the core of our business. We give you the tools; the sources of those tools so you can modify them, we then provide our customers with a high level of service to show them how to use those tools. That service part of the business is key for us. If you, as a customer, are not happy with what we provide then you can stop the subscription after a year and you can keep everything. The aim is to give people as much freedom and flexibility
www.cieonline.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52