Readying itself for this week’s release of Solaris 2.0 (CI No 1,949), the SunPro division of Sun Microsystems Inc based in Mountain View, California, will ship its C Transition Pack on July 1. Combining SparCompilers and SparcWorks development tools from the SparcWorks Professional family of products, the pack helps migrate C applications to version 2.0 from 1.0 of the Solaris operating environment. The announcement is a gentle nudge to developers to move over to the new version of Solaris. Until the end of September this year, the product will be specially priced at UKP618, which SunPro claims is a 70% saving. Transition Packs are also available for other languages like Fortran (UKP1,365 to $2,200), C++ (UKP1,240 to $2,000) and Pascal (UKP1,365 to $2,200), at a 35% saving. The transition packs include CD-ROM disk, user manuals and on-line documentation. The enhanced SparCompilers have optimisation techniques and parallel instruction scheduling to enable developers to get an 8% to 12% improvement from the SuperSparc RISC. However the C compiler now has to be bought separately as it is no longer to be bundled with Solaris: SunPro claims that it is no longer a necessary item for customers. The company has also introduced a network licensing scheme to enable tools and compilers to support different versions of the Solaris environment interchangeably. Version 2.0 of SparcWorks, a set of six development tools for all SparCompilers, will also support Solaris 1.0 from September. SunPro is setting up shop in Europe to market software products geared towards software development. Velizy, France is to be the European headquarters with around 10 staff and other offices will open in London, Northern European Office, and Munich, Central European Office, by the end of this year. The company is also predicting European prices will fall to the same level as in the US.
