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2-4 Getting Started With SHARC Processors
Platform and Processor Support
VisualDSP++ supports SHARC processors from Analog Devices. Win-
dows® System 7 (as of VisualDSP++ 5.0 Update 7), Windows® Vista,
Windows® XP, and Windows® 2000 hosts are supported.
Develop High Performance Applications Quickly
At the heart of VisualDSP++ is a robust and powerful C/C++ compiler.
The compiler consistently delivers industry-leading performance on stan-
dard benchmarks, ensuring that all but the most performance-demanding
applications can be written entirely in the C language, accelerating devel-
opment time while maintaining a portable code base. The compiler is
backed by a rich library of signal processing routines, allowing easy access
to hand-coded, optimized implementations of FFTs, FIRs, and so forth.
The ANSI-C compiler is also augmented with popular language exten-
sions and enhancements to make it more amiable to existing code bases.
Examples include GNU GCC extensions and multiple heap support.
A compiler’s mission is to produce correct code, so there are occasions
when the compiler must take a conservative approach to a code sequence
when a more aggressive approach could have been taken if certain con-
straints could be guaranteed by the programmer. The VisualDSP++
compiler supports a broad range of pragmas that allow the programmer to
better exploit the compiler while maintaining C language neutrality. Just
as important, the compiler has the ability to feed back advisory informa-
tion to the programmer, offering further improvements to a code
sequence, should the programmer be able to make certain guarantees
about it. This information is displayed seamlessly in the VisualDSP++
main editor window. This removes the black box label that compilers
sometimes have.
Backing the compiler is a powerful assembler and linker technology. Pro-
cessors from Analog Devices are noted for their intuitive algebraic
assembly language syntax, and the VisualDSP++ assembler extends that