NVIDIA — Securing the Future of Safety and Security of Embedded Software (Captioned)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it in Rust-versus-C++ and Ada discussions as a real industrial case of choosing SPARK for safer embedded code.
What it is
An AdaCore webinar in which NVIDIA engineers explain why and how they adopted Ada and SPARK for security-critical firmware. It covers the business case and the engineering experience of the transition.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends tnballo · 2022-03 · on “High Assurance Rust: Developing Secure and Robust Software”
Author of the book here, thank you for your feedback! Though not an Ada expert, I have used the SPARK subset. And I’ve worked on security assessment of military systems with components written in Ada. Although we looked at binaries and not source code, because our assurance model did not consider the Ada compiler to be part of the chain of trust (so we test the artifact the CPU will execute). I really like Ada and hope to use more of it in the future! The HN community may be interested in this 1 hour presentation [1] on Nvidia's adoption of Ada, including why they chose it over Rust in 2019 (regulatory certification was one factor). There’s also a great academic paper [2] on the recent advan
Cites kevlar700 · 2022-09 · on “Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?”
Ada offers security and simplicity and is already part of GCC but also has llvm now. Linux kernel drivers have also been demonstrated. Perhaps it would be healthier for Rust to have competition? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Nvidia also chose Spark; a built in subset of Ada as being more cost effective for secure code than C++. [this video] Assembly is also supported by Ada and I found it far easier to add than with C even. C interface support is also excellent.
Cites kevlar700 · 2022-09 · on “Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?”
Ada offers security and simplicity and is already part of GCC but also has llvm now. Linux kernel drivers have also been demonstrated. Perhaps it would be healthier for Rust to have competition? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Nvidia also chose Spark; a built in subset of Ada as being more cost effective for secure code than C++. [this video] Assembly is also supported by Ada and I found it far easier to add than with C even. C interface support is also excellent.
Cites kevlar700 · 2022-09 · on “It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++”
Ada offers security and simplicity and is already part of GCC but also has llvm now. Linux kernel drivers have also been demonstrated. Perhaps it would be healthier for Rust to have competition? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Nvidia also chose Spark; a built in subset of Ada as being more cost effective for secure code than C++. [this video] Assembly is also supported by Ada and I found it far easier to add than with C even. C interface support is also excellent.
Cites adezxc · 2025-06 · on “Ada Continues to Climb in June Tiobe Index and PYPL”
There's this talk by AdaCore and a SWE@nVidia on how nVidia utilized Ada/Spark for Embedded software: [this video]
Cites cpeterso · 2025-09 · on “Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas”
Here’s a related talk: “NVIDIA - Securing the Future of Safety and Security of Embedded Software” [this video] > NVIDIA is working with AdaCore to implement Ada and SPARK programming languages into certain firmware elements to reduce this potential error. In this webinar you will learn how the combination of NVIDIA hardware with Ada and SPARK delivers robustness and security, improving efficiency and safety in the development pipeline.
Cites cpeterso · 2026-05 · on “CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler”
Here's a recording of a 2020 presentation ("Securing the Future of Safety and Security of Embedded Software") from NVIDIA at the AdaCore conference: [this video]