SunPro engineering a practical program development environment

Abstract

While each of the efforts described above significantly improves some aspect of the programming environment on Sun workstations, it is obvious that today's technology allows us to go further. Thus, in parallel with these short-term and comparatively easy but effective improvements, we continue to explore technologies which are expected to produce larger gains but which are much more expensive to achieve. These include fine-grained incremental compilation integrated with editing and debugging, as exemplified by Fritzson's DICE system [Frit84], and an effort to better integrate version control, configuration management, release building and bug tracking more tightly with each other and with an underlying database.

In general, our approach has followed two paths: 1) to identify areas where either major functionality was lacking or where a relatively small effort could result in large gains and to pursue hard-headed engineering solutions to such problems, and 2) to invest in research and follow others' research designed to provide longer-term solutions to larger needs. It is clear from our experience that the first path has paid off; whether the second will succeed as handsomely remains to be seen.