Oracle Solaris Studio

The Oracle Solaris Studio, formerly named Sun Studio, Sun WorkShop, Forte Developer, and SunPro Compilers, is a compiler suite which is Oracle Corporation's flagship software development product for the operating systems Solaris and Linux. The Oracle Solaris Studio software delivers optimizing compilers for C, C++, and Fortran, libraries, and performance analysis, and debugging tools for Solaris on SPARC, and both Solaris and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, including multi-core systems.

The Oracle Studio compiler and development tools software suite is downloadable at no charge from an Oracle website however there are many security and functionality patch updates which are only available with a support contract from Oracle.^[3]

Languages

• C
• C++
• Fortran

Supported architectures

• SPARC
• i86pc (x86 and x86-64)

Components

The Oracle Studio software is a suite of software products that includes:

• C, C++, and Fortran compilers and support libraries
• dbx and frontends
• lint
• IDE based on NetBeans
• Performance analyzer^[4]
• Thread analyzer
• Sun performance library
• Distributed make^[5]

Compiler optimizations

A common optimizing backend is used for code generation.

A high-level intermediate representation called Sun IR is used, and high-level optimizations done in the iropt (intermediate representation optimizer) component are operated at the Sun IR level. Major optimizations include:

• Copy propagation
• Constant folding and constant propagation
• Dead code elimination
• Interprocedural optimization analysis
• Loop optimizations
• Automatic parallelization
• Profile-guided optimization
• Scalar replacement
• Strength reduction
• Vectorization, with -xvector=simd

OpenMP

The OpenMP shared memory parallelization API is native to all three Solaris Studio compilers.

Code coverage

Tcov, a source code coverage analysis and statement-by-statement profiling tool, comes as a standard utility with Sun Studio suite. Tcov generates exact counts of the number of times each statement in a program is executed and annotates source code to add instrumentation.

The tcov utility gives information on how often a program executes segments of code. It produces a copy of the source file, annotated with execution frequencies. The code can be annotated at the basic block level or the source line level. As the statements in a basic block are executed the same number of times, a count of basic block executions equals the number of times each statement in the block is executed.^[6] The tcov utility does not produce any time-based data.

GCCFSS

The GCC for SPARC Systems (GCCFSS) compiler uses GNU Compiler Collection's (GCC) front end with the Sun Studio compiler's code-generating back end. Thus, GCCFSS is able to handle GCC-specific compiler directives, while it is also able to take advantage of the compiler optimizations in the Sun Studio compiler's back end. This greatly facilitates the porting of GCC-based applications to SPARC systems.

GCCFSS 4.2 adds a new functionality as a cross compiler; SPARC binaries can be generated on an x86 (or x64) machine running Solaris.^[7]

Research platform

Before its cancellation, the Rock would have been the first general-purpose processor to support hardware transactional memory (HTM). The Sun Studio compiler is used by a number of research projects, including Hybrid Transactional Memory (HyTM)^[8] and Phased Transactional Memory (PhTM),^[9] to investigate support and possible HTM optimizations.

References

External links

• Oracle Studio home page on Oracle Developer Network
• Cool Tools - GCC for SPARC Systems
• Oracle Studio Forums
• Application Performance Tuning on Sun Platform
• Developer Support Services from Sun Microsystems
• Sun Studio Release History
• downloads/index-jsp-141149.html Download Sun Studio

Documentation

• Current product documentation
• Documentation by topic
• Sun Studio Information Center