Sun unveiled compiler and tool technologies on Monday that leverage multicore chip architectures and extend to Linux application development.
Sun Studio 12 enables development in the C, C++, and Fortran languages for Solaris and, now, Linux. Developers can build enterprise transactional and Web applications and migrate existing programs to support multithreaded capabilities, according to Sun.
"With Sun Studio 12, we are continuing that tradition of record-breaking performance. However, the big message with this release is about multithreaded development," said Sun's Jeet Kaul, vice president of developer products and programs.
With the emergence of multicore chips from Sun and Intel, developers are under pressure to build multithreaded software that leverages multicore chips, Kaul said. "What we have done with Sun Studio 12 is we have made the building of these multithreaded applications easier," he said.
With multicore processors, programmers need to be able to write software that features parallelism. Although Sun already has offered this, Sun Studio 12 provides more tools for it, such as its thread and performance analyzers, Kaul said.
"Both of these tools have the ability to understand multiple threads," said Kaul.
In addition, Sun Studio 12 is the first time Sun is supporting C, C++, and Fortran development for Linux, Kaul said. Developers also can build applications on Linux and compile them, then take the same application with the same source code and run it on Solaris, said Kaul.
Sun's enabling Sun Studio 12 to be used across Solaris and Linux and on different architectures such as Intel and SPARC is valuable to the scientific community, which comprises a good portion of the user base, said analyst Joe Niski of Burton Group.
"I think they made a lot of really smart moves in terms of getting broader reach, not just for the IDE but for the compilers," Niski said.
Sun Studio 12, which is offered free of charge, is based on the NetBeans 5.5 platform. It is accessible on Sun's Web site. Sun offers support services for Sun Studio 12.
