Installation guide

5Development Environment Notes
This chapter contains notes about issues and known problems with the
development environment software and, whenever possible, provides
solutions or workarounds to those problems. The following topics are
discussed:
• General programming
• Realtime programming
• DECthreads (pthreads)
• Profiling
• Debugging with dbx
• Java Programming
5.1 General Programming
The following note applies to general programming.
5.1.1 The malloc Function Is Now Tunable for Better
Multithreaded Performance
The C runtime library malloc function (and associated functions) have been
modified to allow significantly better concurrency when used by
multithreaded applications. Additionally, three new memory allocator tuning
variables have been added to allow more control of allocator behavior:
• __first_fit
• __max_cache
• __delayed_free
As always when developing applications making significant use of
dynamically allocated memory and requiring maximum speed of execution,
you should carefully read the Tuning Memory Allocation section of the
malloc(3) reference page.