Sun has just released the Sun Studio 12 Update 1  which focuses more on improving performance through parallelism.

Sun studio is a set of compilers, tools and libraries, similar to GCC (Gnu Compiler Collection), for developing applications in C, C++ and FORTRAN. You can use it to develop applications for Linux, Solaris and Open Solaris operating systems or rather x86 or SPARC platforms.

It comes with:

· 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

Traditionally developers use GCC as their favorite tool. It’s true that one can’t forget GCC, but evolution is unavoidable, new and better tools keep coming and it’s good for us to upgrade than to stick to old tools.

Let’s first look at the features provided by Sun Studio and how it is better than GCC.

Top 10 Features in Sun Studio:

· Optimized and fine tuned Compilers

· NetBeans 5.5.1-based IDE integrated with several tools.

· dmake, running compilations in distributed/parallel mode.

· Thread Analyzer (works with OpenMP, Pthreads, and Solaris Threads)

· Performance Analyzer, providing operational information on resources being consumed by a given function or load object

· Optimized math libraries several times faster than the previous version.

· Auto-parallelization, OpenMP, and MPI libraries

· Gccfss GCC extensions

· dbx debugger, including DWARF format on all compilers

· Runtime checking, for detecting memory access errors and memory leaks

Compiler Features: The C, C++ and FORTRAN compilers that come bundled with Sun Studio are a generation ahead compared to other freely available compilers. They are highly optimized with several compilation time optimizations including parallelization of loops, provide native OpenMP api support, fine tuned to leverage multi processor and multi core systems. One of my favorite features is the built in garbage collection library for heap management and easy detection of runtime leaks. These compilers also provide a wide range of compiler level checks to ensure that your program is safe and robust.

NetBeans IDE: NetBeans does not need an introduction. It’s one of the most popular IDE’s around and is known for its usability and feature rich editor. Sun Studio comes with NetBeans IDE integrated with the C, C++ and FORTRAN compilers making your life further more easy. The IDE also provides a GUI Editor. It’s also integrated with the dmake tool, dbx debugger, thread analyzer and performance analyzer tools so that you will never have to leave our IDE. NetBeans also offers a number of plugins for use with Sun Studio:

· Dynamic Trace Plugin: The NetBeans DTrace GUI Plugin is a graphical user interface (GUI) for running DTrace scripts. The DTrace GUI includes Chime, a graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations.

· Assembler Support: This module supports x86/SPARC assemblers provided by the compilers as well as disassemblers provided by debuggers. It is being developed as part of the NetBeans C/C++Developer Pack.

· Where Used: This module does C/C++ refactoring including Find Usages and Rename. It is part of the C/C++ Experimental Refactoring module.

· C++ Experimental Call Graph: This module creates a graph representing the calling relationships in a C++ program.

Distributed Parallel Compilation: For most huge C and C++ based applications it takes hours for the entire application to be compiled and linked. The distributed make tool (dmake) saves lot of our precious time by running the compilation parallel on multiple machines. It also partially supports GNU make tool and can also be integrated with several Continuous Integration tools.

Thread and Performance Analyzers: Detecting and debugging deadlocks and race conditions is extremely difficult in multi threaded applications and sometimes takes weeks. The thread analyzer tool that comes with Sun studio and integrated with the bundled NetBeans IDE, Deadlocks and race conditions can be detected in considerably less time. The performance analysis tools provides lot of insight into the resources consumed by a given program--which functions or load objects are consuming the most resources, and which resources are being consumed by a given function or load object. You can do all this from the IDE itself.

GCCFSS: The gccfss (GCC for Sun Systems) compiler uses gcc's front end and 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.

Emphasis on multicore, multithreaded processing: The emphasis on multi core and multi threaded processing in this release of Sun Studio cannot be ignored. There is a great focus on improving performance through parallelism. According to a comparison here at AMD performance has greatly increased in Sun Studio 12 Update 1.

A study by Intel here as proved that The Sun Studio 12 Update1 compiler beats Intel’s own compiler in Intel’s own process by almost 20%.

Comparing performance of Sun Studio with GCC: An article written by Vijay Tatkar here shows that Sun Studio generates at least 80% more optimized code than its GCC counterpart.

Higher number is Better and so also in the Ratio's column, a ratio > 1 means SunStudio is better than GCC

Conclusion: Sun Studio is far ahead in terms of performance optimization, leveraging the power of multi processor and multi threaded machines. It also comes with numerous tools for performance and thread analysis. Its distributed make system takes building software a step ahead.

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