History
The first version of SPARK (based on Ada 83) was produced at the University of Southampton (with UK Ministry of Defence sponsorship) by Bernard Carré and Trevor Jennings. Subsequently the language was progressively extended and refined, first by Program Validation Limited and then by Praxis Critical Systems Limited. In 2004, Praxis Critical Systems Limited changed its name to Praxis High Integrity Systems Limited. In January 2010, the company became Altran Praxis.
In early 2009, Praxis formed a partnership with AdaCore, and released "SPARK Pro" under the terms of the GPL. This was followed in June 2009 by the SPARK GPL Edition 2009, aimed at the FLOSS and academic communities.
In June 2010, Altran Praxis announced that the SPARK programming language would be used in the software of US Lunar project CubeSat, expected to be completed in 2015.
In August 2010, Rod Chapman, principal engineer of Altran Praxis, implemented Skein, one of candidates for SHA-3, in SPARK. He wanted to compare the performance of the SPARK and C implementations. After careful optimization, he managed to have the SPARK version only about 5 to 10% slower than C. Later improvement to the Ada middle-end in GCC (implemented by Eric Botcazou of AdaCore) closed the gap, with the SPARK code matching the C in performance exactly.
Read more about this topic: SPARK (programming Language)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)