Ada is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for safety- and mission-critical software engineering. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services, medical devices, etc. It is also perfectly suited for open source development.

Awareness of safety and security issues in software systems is increasing. Multi-core platforms are now abundant. These are some of the reasons that the Ada programming language and technology attracts more and more attention, among others due to Ada's support for programming by contract and for multi-core targets. The Ada 2012 language definition was approved and published by ISO in December 2012, updated early 2016, and work on new features for the next revision is ongoing. As with the prior Ada 1995 and Ada 2005 standards, the first full implementation of the Ada 2012 standard was made available in gcc - the GNU Compiler Collection (GNAT). More and more tools are available, many are open source, including for small and recent platforms. Interest keeps increasing, also in the open source community, and many exciting projects started.

The Ada DevRoom aims to present the facilities offered by the Ada language (such as for object-oriented, multicore, or embedded programming) as well as some of the many exciting tools and projects using Ada.