Castle has announced the launch of a subscription scheme for its C/C++ development suite. The scheme aims to fund future development of the compiler suite through annual subscriptions, or as Castle spin it: "This step aims to ensure that RISC OS developers see a continuous flow of improvements to the development suite, providing better code density and performance for RISC OS applications than ever before."In addition features introduced into ARM development tools in the embedded world over the last few years will now be brought to the RISC OS platform for the first time."
Spiffy. And the most incredible thing about this? The road map, sorry, the proposed road map. Castle have listed developments that they haven't released yet, which is pretty uncharacteristic of them, although expected for a rolling subscription system. An inline assembler, packed structure support and other updates are "due for immediate release". Also, an updated optimiser with support for instruction scheduling, further C99 support and other features are planned for some time later in 2004.
Is it worth writing home about these features? Useful these updates are, and although GCC has had a number of these abilities for a while now, the differences between the compilers are well documented. Certainly, it's welcoming to see Castle, for a change, express the direction of future product development ahead of release.
Links
Castle C/C++ development tools website