Analog Devices 82-003536-01 manual Integrate Into Your Existing Environment, Evaluation Tools

Evaluation Tools

the majority of its time is quickly assembled. This tool can be used to eas- ily inspect an application for unexpected hotspots (for example, suggesting the need to move a key routine from external to internal memory). Simu- lator targets provide a completely linear profiling view.

Going even further, the VisualDSP++ compiler is able to act upon profil- ing information. Profile-guided optimization (PGO) is a technique that allows the compiler to instrument an application, run the application, and then make a second pass compilation, exploiting the information that was gathered during the previous run of the application. This gives the com- piler unique insight on a block-by-block basis, allowing it to optimize with a level of granularity that is not possible with a tool that operates only on a file-by-file basis.

Integrate Into Your Existing Environment

A development tool suite is always a part of an organization’s larger soft- ware engineering environment. VisualDSP++ has been designed to operate in a larger environment.

Since an embedded systems engineer is often developing on a new plat- form while maintaining existing products that were likely developed with an earlier version of the tools, VisualDSP++ can be installed discretely an arbitrary number of times at a variety of release levels, allowing engineer- ing to easily switch between current and legacy versions of VisualDSP++.

To better integrate to source code control (SCC) systems, VisualDSP++ is able to connect to any SCC provider that supports the Microsoft® com- mon source code control (MCSCC) interface. This interface is supported by all leading SCC vendors. VisualDSP++ goes one step further by sup- porting the control of VisualDSP++ itself within a source code control system.

The ability to robustly test an embedded application is enabled through a comprehensive automation application programming interface (API). Using language-neutral automation technology from Microsoft®, nearly

2-8 Getting Started With SHARC Processors