As an Ada enthusiast, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at machine learning, but was discouraged by the fact that Python seemed to be the only language supported by most ML frameworks. However, I recently discovered the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format, a universal way of representing machine learning models, and a library for working with it. One thing I love about ONNX is that there are many pre-trained models available for various applications.

I was excited to find out that I could use Ada to load and make inference with ONNX models, so I created a binding for the ONNX Runtime library and wrote a couple of example programs. These examples include handwriting digit recognition and English speech synthesis. Unfortunately, the speech synthesis example required converting text to phoneme sequences, which I haven’t yet implemented in Ada, in order to keep the examples compact.

Overall, I’m thrilled to have been able to dive into the world of machine learning using my favorite programming language, and I hope that other Ada enthusiasts will find this information useful. If anyone is interested in trying it out for themselves, I’m happy to share my code and provide more information on how to get started with Ada and ONNX.

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GitLab is a repository management system for storing software source code, you might say an analogue of GitHub. While the core features of GitLab are comparable to its counterparts, some implementation features can be useful for the Ada community. One of them is the code navigation directly on the repository site. GitLab understands (let’s face it, not very well) semantic information about the program in LSIF (Language Server Index Format) format, which allows you to enable code navigation, tooltips, etc. for any language. GitLab counterparts now only offer navigation support for a limited range of languages.

Having code navigation on your site is nice and makes it easier to get to know your code and conduct code reviews. To enable it in your repository, simply create a CI Pipeline which indexes the source code after changes and uploads the result as a special type of artifact. The prototype indexer program is already ready, it’s not hard to build with Alire. I prepared a script, which can be run with a one-liner:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reznikmm/als-alire-index/main/make_lsif.sh | bash

To avoid having to build the indexer program every time you change it, you can add it directly to the image used by the pipeline, together with the compiler and alire. This is what the Dockerfile looks like:

FROM ubuntu:22.04
RUN apt-get update \
 && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y \
      python3 curl unzip git libgmp-dev libc6-dev make python3-pip python3-venv \
 && curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reznikmm/als-alire-index/main/make_lsif.sh | bash \
 && mv -v alr lsif-ada /bin/ \
 && apt-get purge -y --auto-remove python3 python3-pip python3-venv \
 && apt-get clean \
 && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* /root/clean

I put the pushed image on the Docker Hub as reznik/gnat:alire and it can be used in any repository. As an example, I’ve enabled navigation in my TLS repository. You can now see where any identifier is defined with the mouse pointer.

Would you like to give it a try?

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Initial implementation of Alire support and two new refactoring tools:

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I taught my elephant to change places with me if his room name is bigger than mine and that cut the number of search options in half But this isn’t enough to get the answer fast anyway…

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Spent a huge amount of time to understand why Ada.Integer_Text_IO.Get is unable to read a value from 0: string . As always I forgot about deprecated integer format, where # could b replaced by :. Isn’t time to get rid of this in 2022?

http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/rm12_w_tc1/html/RM-J-2.html

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