Following on from the successful launch of the 32bit compatible RISC OS C/C++ Development Suite in October 2002, Castle announce today that it will be offering future upgrades to the development suite on a subscription basis for just £59 per annum inc vat (reduced to £45* if paid by direct debit, before 31st May 2004). New purchases of the development suite at a RRP of £199 inc vat will include a subscription for the first year.
This step aims to ensure that RISC OS developers see a continuous flow of improvements to the development suite, providing better code density and performance for RISC OS applications than ever before. In addition features introduced into ARM development tools in the embedded world over the last few years will now be brought to the RISC OS platform for the first time.
Highlights due for immediate release include the addition of an "inline assembler" and "packed structure support" to the compiler. The "inline assembler" allows the use of features of the ARM processor that cannot otherwise be accessed from C/C++ and in some circumstances allows the generation of more efficient code. Packing structures removes the padding normally inserted into structures that align the elements of the structure onto their natural size boundary (e.g. int on 32-bit boundary, short on 16-bit boundary). This allows structures to be mapped more efficiently onto external data items (such as data being received off a network).
Later in 2004 Castle expect to release a version of the compiler containing a revamped optimiser. One of the main features that this will provide will be support for instruction scheduling. This will give the compiler a knowledge of the instruction pipeline of the target processor, allowing it to avoid the generation of instruction sequences that cause processor interlocks where the processor has to wait for previous instructions to fully complete before continuing. This is expected to give a noticeable performance improvement for compiled code running on both StrongARM and XScale based systems.
Other roadmap plans include completing C99 support and the addition of support for long long variable types for C++. Subscribers will also be given the opportunity to offer suggestions and provide feature requests to help direct the future direction of the development of the tools.
Full details of this subscription scheme can be found at www.iyonix.com/tools/ complete with a proposed road map for the development of the tools.
The C/C++ RISC OS development kit includes the following software:
Some of the updated features in this release are:
*Annual pricing structure for C/C++ development tools subscription: Full price - £59 If ordered before 31st May - £49 If ordered before 31st May with payment by direct debit - £45