Sun Studio 10 FAQ

Sun Studio 10 provides several major new features:

• 64-bit compiler support for the Solaris x86 platform
• improved feature parity between Solaris SPARC and x86 platforms
• improved code generation for AMD Opteron processors for both 32- and 64-bit architectures
• support for C++ template template parameters
• numerous performance improvements and bug fixes

The x86 Solaris 10 platform not only provides 64-bit addressing, but also provides improved performance for many applications that would otherwise work well in 32-bit mode.

Sun Studio compiler features available on Solaris OS SPARC platforms are now available on Solaris OS x86 platforms, for both 32- and 64-bit. These include:

• OpenMP 2.0 in C, C++ and Fortran (-xopenmp)
• automatic parallelization (-xautopar)
• thread-local storage in C and C++ (__thread)
• interprocedural optimization (-xipo)
• profile-feedback optimization (-xprofile)
• loop dependence analysis and transforms (-xdepend)
• loop vectorization (-xvector)
• restricted parameters (-xrestrict)
• type-based alias analysis (-xalias_level)
• memory prefetching (-xprefetch)
• Sun Performance library (-xlic_lib=sunperf, -library=sunperf)
• non-standard floating-point computation (-fns)

This product is supported on the Solaris SPARC platform and the Solaris x86 platform including AMD Opteron 32-bit and 64-bit processors, and on three Linux platforms.

Yes. C, C++ and Fortran compilers offer -xarch=amd64 mode for compiling for the AMD64 platform. Additionally, there is support in dbx and performance tools to analyze 64-bit binaries. Math and performance libraries are specifically tuned for AMD64 architecture. The assembler and disassembler tools have also been extended to understand new instructions and exploit new hardware. The rest of the toolset remains largely unchanged.

No. You must install Sun Studio 10 software in a different directory.

You start the Sun Studio 10 IDE with the sunstudio command. For more information, see the sunstudio(1) man page.

This release is supported on the Linux Operating System. This version contains the following components:

• Same NetBeans-based IDE as on our other supported platforms
• Editors of choice: (GVIM, XEmacs, builtin)
• Distributed building utility (dmake)
• CLI- and GUI-based debugger (dbx) for GCC generated binaries
• Performance Tools (including Analyzer) for tuning GCC generated executables
• X-Designer GUI builder
• Documentation including Installation and Setup Guide, man pages, READMEs, and Release Notes.

We are supporting:

1. JDS Sun Java[tm] Desktop System, Release 2
2. SUSE (SLES) 8SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 x86
3. RHEL 3.0Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

We are employing a single configuration, single box, single price model. The media for all three versions: Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86, and Linux are in the product box. Users are able to install the software on the platform of their choice. A single serial number will enable the software on either platform.