Technology from the failed Digital Equipment Corp spin-off Tracepoint Technology Inc has now turned up at compiler company Metrowerks Inc, best known for the CodeWarrier programmer’s toolset for Apple Macintoshes, and more recently Windows. Tracepoint was spun-off from DEC in 1997 to develop and market tools originally created at the company’s Western Research Lab in Palo Alto for use with Digital Unix on the Alpha. Tracepoint, with DEC as a 60% shareholder and $2.5m in venture capital funding, set up in San Jose to market the C and C++ HiProf tools to Windows NT and Window95 users. But only a year later, DEC abruptly pulled the plug (CI No 3,338), and TracePoint became the final victim of DEC’s extensive ‘slash and burn’ divestment strategy before it was acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. Metrowerks has now obtained a license agreement for the technology, codenamed Atom, which arose from DEC’s research into binary code instrumentation. Atom was used by DEC to identify possible performance bottlenecks in executing code, and was claimed to have resulted in an average increase in performance of 10% to 24% for executables running on DEC’s Alpha workstations. Tracepoint extended the tools to work with graphical programming tools on x86 processors under the names HiProf and Visual Coverage. Metrowerks has now merged the two into a single product due for release shortly called Cats, for Codewarrier Analysis Tools. Cats includes a graphical hierarchical profiler to analyze time spent in the different sections of an executing program, and a graphical code covering software tool which analyzes at runtime which sections of a given binary have been executed.
