Lucid Inc, Menlo Park, California wants to be as well known for its C and C++ products as it is for its Unix programming tools for the Lisp market, and has launched Lucid C, describing it as a high-performing, fully-compliant ANSI C compiler for Sparc-based workstations – and as a latecomer to the market is selling on price, setting a $500 tag against a typical $900 to $2,000. The company is promising other compiler and programming environment products in the new family in the third and fourth quarter of the year. Lucid C will be available at the end of the month with documentation and a 90-day money back guarantee. The company says that as Lucid C was tailored to the Sparc architecture, it has been designed to exploit features like parameter passing in registers, and branch scheduling. It also uses optimisation techniques from the supercomputing world, resulting in optimised code that is claimed generally to outper form other C compilers, Lucid says.
