New tools from Sun, Microsoft

It’s a good week for developers: Sun pushes its compilers to do more with Linux and multi-core systems, while Microsoft unveiled more about the next version of Visual Studio.

Sun’s developer toolchain for native (C/C++ and FORTRAN) code is called Sun Studio. This is different and distinct from Java Studio, which is an entirely different toolchain for Java development. Both are based on the NetBeans open-source IDE framework, but that’s just about all they have in common. The Sun Studio tools are evolved from the old Forte tools. The announcement on Monday was that Sun Studio 12 is now available.

For a while now, Sun Studio has focused primarily on Solaris on SPARC and x64, but recently also embraced Linux. The new version, Sun Studio 12, improves the support for Linux on x86/x64. But the big changes have to do with tools for debugging, profiling and optimization for multi-core processors.

This is important because, when you’re tuning for top performance, there are subtle differences in the behavior of, say, a server with eight unicore processors, four dual-core processors or two quad-core processors. Yes, all have eight hardware threads, but you’ll have different issues for cache sharing, memory access, deadlocks/races and so-on.

Sun has tweaked the tools to work with the Intel and AMD microprocessor architectures. Both the Opteron and Xeon chips have essentially the same instruction sets, but Intel uses an eternal memory controller with a uniform memory access architecture, while AMD has on-chip memory controllers and uses a NUMA architecture.

Sun’s tools are all free to use. Support contracts range from US$864 to $1,200 per year per developer seat.

Meanwhile, at Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft formally named Visual Studio “Orcas” as Visual Studio 2008. A newly announced feature is the “Visual Studio Shell,” which sounds like elements of the Eclipse platform, as it lets software companies ship their own custom IDEs based on Visual Studio. A second beta of VS2008, with the shell, is supposed to come out this summer.