At a lower level in the formal verification stack than this, it's on the one hand awesome that ARM has published a machine readable architecture specification for the more recent A architectures in ASL... and on the other hand extremely frustrating that they haven't done the same for M.
"For example, the ASL code published through the A-Profile Arm Architecture Reference Manual, Exploration Tools downloads for A-Profile, or the Armv8-M Architecture Reference Manual."
I hadn't noticed that... wonder if it's new. Just downloaded the Armv8-M ARM (nice acronym) and... this might be helpful, but man extracting this stuff from a PDF seems error-prone and the wrong way to do it.
I suspect you've believed that this didn't exist due to the predominance of pre-Armv8-M devices in the market: there is no ASL for Armv7-M and earlier, and devices based on these older cores remain extremely common (STM32F1x, etc.) The good news is this is changing as new devices appear. The bad news is there probably will never be ASL published for older cores.
I always enjoy stories about Ada, Pascal, Object Pascal, Prolog, Perl, OCaml, Standard ML, Forth, Pike, Fortran, Scheme, Common Lisp, or some APL derivative in use in the wild.
It’s especially good to see a story about a recent project on a smaller system using Ada.
Some of my first experiments with Ada were based on this tutorial series! Great to see it on the front-page of HN.
Since this was published, it's become a lot easier to set up an ARM toolchain using Alire, Ada's package manager. AdaCore have also created some new tools for auto-generating the startup code for ARM systems: https://www.adacore.com/blog/ada-on-any-arm-cortex-m-device-...
Good to see Ada on the front page. I played with it years ago and just recently decided to start learning Ada again. So far I am just using Gnat on Linux writing small programs and packages. I like how the syntax is expressive and reads naturally while relying heavily on types.
edit: should add that is has its warts. Things like Wide and WideWide Character and String objects for unicode. And the interesting attribute syntax: Object'Attribute was built-in and not available to the user until Ada 2022.
Cortex-M is a lovely platform. Shame it has stagnated. Both STM32H7 (or N6) or NXP RT1170/80 beg for a major update - more performance, inclusion of NEON (or equivalent), support for DDR3 at least, PCIe?
It would be amazing for doing some more complex DSP.
Otherwise using those platforms is a bit like programming on 8086 today. Fun. You get basic stuff done and then you hit a wall. Only option is to jump on SoM stuff or FPGA which is another can of worms in itself.
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"For example, the ASL code published through the A-Profile Arm Architecture Reference Manual, Exploration Tools downloads for A-Profile, or the Armv8-M Architecture Reference Manual."
https://developer.arm.com/architectures/architecture%20speci...
I suspect you've believed that this didn't exist due to the predominance of pre-Armv8-M devices in the market: there is no ASL for Armv7-M and earlier, and devices based on these older cores remain extremely common (STM32F1x, etc.) The good news is this is changing as new devices appear. The bad news is there probably will never be ASL published for older cores.
It’s especially good to see a story about a recent project on a smaller system using Ada.
Since this was published, it's become a lot easier to set up an ARM toolchain using Alire, Ada's package manager. AdaCore have also created some new tools for auto-generating the startup code for ARM systems: https://www.adacore.com/blog/ada-on-any-arm-cortex-m-device-...
edit: should add that is has its warts. Things like Wide and WideWide Character and String objects for unicode. And the interesting attribute syntax: Object'Attribute was built-in and not available to the user until Ada 2022.
It would be amazing for doing some more complex DSP.
Otherwise using those platforms is a bit like programming on 8086 today. Fun. You get basic stuff done and then you hit a wall. Only option is to jump on SoM stuff or FPGA which is another can of worms in itself.