Integrated Development Environment Finds More Bugs and Speeds Development Time

DoubleCheck builds on Green Hills Software's 24 years of compiler technology expertise to locate programming problems that lead to security and reliability failures in software. DoubleCheck processes the entire project's source code to find flaws, such as buffer overflows, resource leaks, invalid pointer references, overly complex code (as measured by metrics such as McCabe), and violations of safe language rules such as MISRA 2004. DoubleCheck differs from other static analysis tools by virtue of its speedy analysis time and full integration with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Whereas other static analysis tools are relegated to sporadic use by quality assurance teams, DoubleCheck can be enabled by all developers all the time, ensuring that bugs are found and eradicated as quickly as possible. Because it is integrated with the MULTI IDE, no extra work is needed to ensure that DoubleCheck can handle even the largest source code bases. DoubleCheck generates reports that can be conveniently browsed with any web client. While other static analysis products cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year with per-line of code fees, DoubleCheck is available with a MULTI 5.0 development seat, thereby maximizing the enterprise-wide investment in developer IDEs.

MULTI 5.0 introduces a new distributed build environment that enables developers to take advantage of a site's computing resources, which are often idle and underutilized, to build applications in parallel over the network. The distributed build system is easy to configure and automatically detects when network compute resources are available for builds. Distributed builds often result in immediate build time reductions of between 30% and 80%. Faster builds enable developers to integrate and test software modifications more quickly, speeding time to market.

MULTI 5.0 has a new prototyping tool that provides a 10x - 50x performance speed-up over traditional instruction set simulators by employing dynamic binary translation technology. While engineers have always understood the benefits of simulation technology, the promise has often fallen short, when the simulation runs too slowly to be of practical, everyday use. MULTI’s simulator, however, will often outstrip the performance of the actual target, making it ideal for teams that need to share a limited number of boards and/or need a head start on development, when hardware is not yet ready. The simulator also has a plug-in DLL architecture that enables the integration of custom peripheral simulations, rounding out a complete system prototyping platform.

“Distributed builds, source code analysis, and fast simulators enable faster time to market while generating a more reliable product,” said Tom Zavisca, director of engineering at Green Hills Software. “With these new product introductions, Green Hills Software has again extended its technology lead in device software optimization by bringing enterprises a value proposition that will greatly benefit their product development process.”