Sun Studio
Developed by	Sun Microsystems
Latest release	Sun Studio 12 / June 04, 2007
Preview release	Sun Studio Express 07/08 / July, 2008
OS	Solaris, OpenSolaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Available in	English Japanese Simplified Chinese
Type	Compiler, Debugger, Software build, Integrated Development Environment
Website	developers.sun.com/sunstudio

The Sun Studio compiler suite is Sun Microsystems' flagship software development product for Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio software delivers optimizing C, C++, and Fortran compilers, libraries, and performance analysis, and debugging tools for the Solaris OS on SPARC, and both Solaris and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, including the latest multi-core systems.

The Sun Studio software suite is downloadable at no charge from the Sun Studio download website.

Previous names of this product include Sun WorkShop, Forte Developer, and SunPro Compilers.

Languages

• C
• C++
• Fortran

Supported architectures

• SPARC
• i86pc (x86 and x86-64)
• AMD64

Components

Sun Studio is a suite of software products that includes:

• C/C++/Fortran compilers and support libraries
• The Sun Studio IDE based on NetBeans
• dbx command-line and GUI based debuggers
• Performance Analyzer
• Thread Analyzer
• Sun Performance Library

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 analysis
• Loop optimizations
• Parallelization
• Profile feedback
• Scalar replacement
• Strength reduction
• Vectorization (with -xvector=simd)

OpenMP

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

gccfss

The gccfss (GCC for Sun Systems) compiler uses gcc's front end and Sun Studio's 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 Sun'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. ^[1]

Research platform

As the Rock processor will be 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) ^[2] and Phased Transactional Memory (PhTM) ^[3], to investigate support and possible HTM optimizations.

Documentation

• Documentation by topic
• Sun Studio Information Center

References

External links

• Sun Studio home page on Sun Developer Network
• Cool Tools - GCC for SPARC Systems
• Sun Studio Forums
• Application Performance Tuning on Sun Platform
• Developer Support Services from Sun Microsystems
• Sun Studio Wiki Pages