News

Do you want to be abreast of the articles written by the authors all over the world on the most contemporary topics (static analysis, 64-bit and parallel programming)? Do you want to know what articles you should read first? We have a new section "Article reviews" on our site viva64.com.

While carrying out investigations in the sphere of developing tools for 64-bit and parallel software developers, we, naturally, study publications by various authors on these topics. But people interested in them find it difficult to get familiar with all the articles because one has to look for them somewhere and it is not very easy.

That is why we decided to make brief reviews (up to 2 paragraphs) for these articles. These are neither abstracts, nor author-generated summaries and nor user-generated content. The reviews of the articles are written by our colleagues who are always involved in this sphere.

All the article reviews are arranged in three groups:

• 64-bit Development
• Parallel Programming
• Code Analyzers

Here are some examples of the reviews.

In the world of rapidly developing programming technologies it is important for all software developers to decide what standard and programming model to choose as universal to save time and money. The Open Group argues that LP64 programming model be the best solution for 64-bit programming. This conclusion is drawn from the results of analysis and comparison of ILP64 and LP64 models against several evaluation criteria, each being thoroughly commented and explained. Among these the authors list portability, interoperability with 32-bit environments, standards conformance, performance effects and transition costs.

In his article, Herb Sutter discusses the problem of concurrency becoming the next approaching revolution for software development, its causes, consequences and costs. A major part of the paper is devoted to analyzing the current state in the computer industry and explaining why sequential applications cannot benefit from the throughput gains any more and must yield to concurrent (mainly multithreaded) software; and how to deal with this problem as well. The paper is written in a lively and ironical manner but provides a truly serious and thorough review of the coming changes. Sure, it will be interesting and helpful for every developer.

Nowadays, when medicine employs complex devices for treating patients, software used in them must be secured from any defects and bugs. The paper concerns static analysis of such software systems. There are several sections that describe the essence of static analysis method, defect classes both common for software development on the whole and specific for medical devices, the task of choosing the best static code analysis tool and factors to consider while making this choice.

All the article reviews contain links to the source articles. We hope that our reviews will help you become more aware of the state of this sphere today.