Inmos International Plc has announced that its ANSI C Toolsets are available for four new development environments – the IMS D7214 for IBM and NEC personal computers under PC-DOS, IMS D6214 for VAX VMS, IMS D5214 for Sun 3 under SunOS 4.0.3, and IMS D4214 for Sun 4 under SunOS 4.0.3. These C cross-development systems include compiler and debugging tools, and they can be used for building parallel programs on single and multiple Transputers or on mixed networks. Inmos is claiming that the new C compiler achieves up to a 30% improvement in program execution speed over previous C compilers by using a range of code implementation techniques, and programs developed with the toolsets are both source and binary compatible across all host development systems. Three debugging tools are included in the Toolset – T425 simulator, a symbolic breakpointing debugger and a post-mortem symbolic debugger. The T425 simulator enables code to be executed on the host machine, except for MS-DOS personal computers, which need a Transputer board, and it provides machine level debugging support including breakpoints. The interactive breakpointing debugger provides source level interactive debugging across mixed networks of processors or mixed language programs, and breakpoints may be set in process on any processor in the system to enable developers to examine processes running on different processors. The post-mortem debugger works with the same code as will run in the final product, supporting cases where the program works under simulation and when debugging is compiled in, but fails when debugging is removed. An assembler insert facility is provided which supports access to the Transputer’s full instruction set, symbolic access to C variables and loading multiword values, and results of C expressions into the registers.
