Editing GNAT (section)

== History ==

The GNAT project started in 1992 when the [[United States Air Force]] awarded [[New York University]] (NYU) a contract to build a [[free software|free]] compiler for Ada to help with the Ada&nbsp;9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract required{{citation_needed|date=December 2021}} the use of the [[GNU General Public License|GNU GPL]] for all development, and assigned the copyright to the [[Free Software Foundation]]. The first official validation of GNAT occurred in 1995.

In 1994 and 1996, the original authors of GNAT {{clarify|date=December 2021}}{{who|date=July 2022}} founded two sister companies, '''Ada Core Technologies''' in New York City and ACT-Europe (later AdaCore SAS) in Paris, to provide continuing development and commercial support of GNAT. The two companies always operated as one entity, but did not formally unify until 2012 as AdaCore.<ref name="GNAT-Pro-Insider-2014-2015">[http://www.adacore.com/uploads/newsletter/GNAT_Pro_Insider_Autumn-Winter_2014-2015.pdf GNAT Pro Insider] Autumn/Winter 2014–2015, p.1</ref>

GNAT was initially released separately from the main GCC sources. On October 2, 2001, the GNAT sources were contributed to the GCC [[Concurrent Versions System|CVS]] repository.<ref>[https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-cvs/2001-10/msg00028.html GCC CVS mailing list archive] "New language: Ada"</ref> The last version to be released separately was GNAT 3.15p, based on GCC 2.8.1, on October 2, 2002. Starting with GCC 3.4, on major platforms the official GCC release is able to pass 100% of the [[Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite|ACATS]] Ada tests included in the GCC testsuite. By GCC 4.0, more exotic platforms were also able to pass 100% of the ACATS tests.