DPS Suites -- Preparation for 64-bit in launch of DPS 10.5

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 13 January 2011]

The long wait is nearly over. We're on the cusp of releasing 64-bit application support in DevPartner Studio 10.5. Long time fans of BoundsChecker can finally scale above the 32-bit ceiling. For those with long memories, you may recall that there was a BoundsChecker-64 release years ago. This was an effort undertaken with Intel for support of the first Itanium chips. However, one of the limitations of that offering, apart that commercially our Itanium support never caught fire, was that we only ever had support for Active Check in BC. That meant no compile-time instrumentation for finding the real insidious memory bugs that Final Check detects. By pulling our compile-time instrumentation into the x64 direct and cross-compilers in MSVC++, we can in DPS 10.5 run Final Check with all its memory tracking power intact against x64 binaries. Furthermore, because we pulled up compile-time instrumentation, we were able to follow suit with Performance and Coverage analysis of native C++ via the same compiler and linker manipulations. Now that the x64 architecture is ubiquitous as a commodity plaform, hopefully anyone doing C++ (or .NET, or mixed) can again squash their bugs with reckless abandon using DPS 10.5.