Compliers feature C/C++ functional safety certification

At the heart of unlocking a processor core’s capabilities, the compilers, tool chain and associated MULTI Integrated Development Environment (IDE), continue their 35 year heritage as the premium code generation standard trusted by global companies creating critical software systems requiring the highest processor execution speed and smallest code size within the shortest software development time.

The C/C++ Compilers 2017.5 are already in heavy use by global companies’ software-critical devices and systems in automotive, aerospace, storage, medical, military, industrial and personal communication markets.

“As embedded systems become more complex, more connected, and more exposed, the value of quality and secure software is placed at an even greater premium,” said Chris Rommel, Executive Vice President at VDC Research.

“In order to meet today’s development and time-to-market challenges, engineers should turn to proven compiler technology leaders like Green Hills Software, which has a track record of delivering premium solutions for complex and safety-critical markets.”

Optimised performance
Over its 35 year history, Green Hills Optimising Compilers have implemented both general-purpose compiler optimisations and CPU-specific optimisations to enable C and C++ developers to extract the most from purpose-built features of 37 processor architectures.

Compiler 2017.5 supports embedded architectures including Arm, Intel, Power Architecture, Renesas RH850, MIPS, ColdFire and TriCore, delivering the highest performance to date:

• Maximum performance 16-50% higher as measured over hundreds of industry and customer benchmarks, besting results from GNU and LLVM compilers
• New support keeping pace with the latest architecture extensions for Armv8-A, Armv8-R and Armv8-M, including new security instructions
• Improved control and utilisation of CPU pipeline architectures, floating point optimisations and opcode utilisation
• Enhanced control for auto-vectorisation of leading SIMD instruction extensions including Arm NEON and Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE)

Processor manufacturers have chosen Green Hills compilers more than all other competing compilers when publishing their highest performance scores on their processors using EEMBC Processor Benchmarks - the industry standard benchmarks for embedded systems.

Certified safety and reliability
Life-critical software is assuming more and more control of embedded and IoT devices that fly aircraft, brake a car, control surgical robots or manage hard disk drives.

Development teams rely on a C/C++ compiler that produces machine code with the utmost quality, rigorously developed and meticulously tested in an accredited software process environment.

Green Hills C/C++ Optimising Compilers 2017.5 are certified as qualified tools at the highest levels of functional safety for automotive (ISO 26262 ASIL D), industrial (IEC 61508 SIL 3) and railway (EN 50128 SWSIL 4).

In addition, the integrated single-pass MISRA-C adherence checker gives development teams a flexible means to prevent new bugs and enforce cleaner, higher quality code.

Green Hills compilers are also tightly integrated into the DoubleCheck static analysis tool that performs full program analysis in a single pass, finding bugs caused by complex interactions between pieces of code across many source files.

Compatibility and productivity
The software development phase is often the most costly portion of developing an embedded system or IoT product. C/C++ Compilers 2017.5 add new features and under-the-hood technology that can ultimately decrease time-to-market and time-to-volume:

• As the popularity of third party tools that automatically generate code grows, Green Hills compilers have greatly expanded its maximum number of user sections and internal number of variables
• Greater compatibility and flexibility when linking with third-party code through the Arm Application Binary Interface (ABI)
• Enhanced visibility for third-party libraries to detect vector optimisations in use
• Enhanced support for various C++ language constructs