Oracle continues to press the open source developer button, shrugging off its long-term criticism in this space with this week's release of Solaris Studio 12.3 edition. This C, C++, and Fortran development platform now comes with a branded "Code Analysis" tool designed to detect application vulnerabilities, including memory leaks and memory access violations.
As the current (and presumably permanent) stewards of the Java language and platform, Oracle has taken particular pains to evidence its commitment to open source since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The company claims that this new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications by up to 300 percent as a result of leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.
Optimized for Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux (yes Oracle still boasts "Linux commitment and leadership"), Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 has built-in remote access capabilities so developers can create Oracle Solaris or Linux applications from Oracle Solaris, Linux, Windows, or Mac OS desktops.
The new release comes with an analysis suite designed to provide developers with a chance to observe their applications' interactions with the underlying system, improving application correctness, reliability, and performance. Plus there are new install and patch-provisioning repositories built upon the Oracle Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) to simplify the installation and management of Oracle Solaris Studio.
Oracle senior director of software development Don Kretsch is on the record for this news announcement with a quote enriched by terms including "cutting-edge compiler technology" and "security and agility" — but more interesting is this simple statement (below) from the company's news pages.
"For over a decade, Oracle Solaris Studio has offered a suite of multi-thread aware developer tools that help application writers take advantage of hardware concurrency in new multi-core systems. Oracle continues to deliver state-of-the-art optimizing compilers that simplify the creation of parallel applications. Accompanied by advanced performance, debugging, and thread-analysis tools, developers using Solaris Studio can more easily create and deploy enterprise applications that exploit Oracle's latest hardware systems."
