Leading the Embedded World

Since 1982, the Green Hills Optimizing Compilers have led the embedded industry by generating the fastest, smallest, and most reliable code. Hundreds of millions of products using embedded electronics—from automobiles, satellites and aircraft to phones, printers and surgical tools—run code generated by a Green Hills Compiler.

Maximize performance

As the pace of microprocessor innovation continues to accelerate, application developers know they can rely on Green Hills Compilers to unlock the hardware's full potential and realize maximum performance and functional safety in their next-generation applications.

Green Hills Compilers use the most advanced optimizations to maximize your program's performance even within strict size constraints. For example, our CodeFactor™ optimization speeds your program's execution and reduces its size by removing redundant segments of code via subroutine calls and tail merges. Static basing provides the same benefits (faster speed, smaller size) by grouping data items to significantly reduce the number of load address operations.

Every one of our optimizations—whether it's our own innovation or an industry standard—is meticulously implemented. Continuing three decades of engineering excellence, we painstakingly research and then test each one against hundreds of benchmarks.

Careful implementation and cutting-edge technology mean that on most programs the Green Hills Compilers can improve speed and reduce size by at least a 20% compared to the both GNU and LLVM compilers.

Fine-tune output

While the Green Hills Compilers provide excellent default settings, we understand that your application is unique. You can fine-tune compiler output by enabling different combinations of optimizations and by configuring optimizations on a per-project or per-file basis.

Silicon vendors publish certified EEMBC benchmarks to showcase their processor's performance on a wide range of real-world applications. These vendors have selected the scores generated with Green Hills Compilers to publish more than twice as many times over the any other compiler.

To reach the highest level of performance, Green Hills offers custom performance-tuning that uses our expertise in embedded systems to make your program run faster. We can even develop custom optimizations based on our evaluation of your application.

For example, working recently in collaboration with ARM architecture specialists, our compiler team added multiple new optimizations that enabled the Green Hills Compiler to achieve a performance score of 1.01 EEMBC Automarks/MHz rating on the Cortex-R5 processor. This represents a 30% increase on previous performance scores.

Speed time-to-market

C++ version support

Green Hills Compilers support ISO/IEC 14882:2011 (C++11), :2014 (C++14), and :2017 (C++17) which offer a number of new language features and standard libraries. These include standardized threading which is supported by the INTEGRITY real-time operating system.

Broad processor support

Ensuring fast time to market depends critically on keeping up with the availability of the latest target hardware. Our frequent releases and tight ties to silicon vendors mean that our compilers typically support new hardware before it's even commercially available.

Tight integration

Green Hills Compilers are part of a complete development solution. Our products provide every tool and system for the entire software development, testing, and maintenance cycle—all seamlessly integrated to save you time.

Along with our INTEGRITY RTOS, the MULTI IDE supports both compiling and debugging for selected versions of Linux. For development directly on your target, all these products work seamlessly with the Green Hills Probe and SuperTrace Probe hardware debug devices.

Language support

Our conformance to key industry standards allows you to quickly and easily adopt Green Hills Compilers, which support:

  • Embedded C++
  • GNU C/C++ extensions

Ensure safety & reliability

Industry certifications

As part of the MULTI toolchain, the Green Hills Compilers have been certified to meet the highest levels of tool qualification and C/C++ runtime certification:

  • IEC 61508:2010 (Industrial), EN 50128:2011 (Railway) and ISO 26262:2018 (Automotive) functional safety standards
  • Certificates received from both TÜV NORD and exida
  • Satisfies both SIL 4 (Safety Integrity Level) and ASIL D (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) tool qualification and C/C++ runtime certification requirements—the highest levels achievable
  • Supported on a broad set of target processors

Supported Processors and hosts

Green Hills Compilers are available for a variety of 32- and 64-bit processors including:

Supported processor-specific extensions include AltiVec and SPE (for Power Architecture), NEON (for AArch32 and AArch64) and SSE (for Intel Architecture). Green Hills Compilers are available for Windows and Linux hosts.

Prevent new bugs

To help you avoid common programming mistakes, the Green Hills Compilers provide automated enforcement of clean coding conventions. You can enforce industry standards like the MISRA 2012 and 2004 guidelines, or you can enforce our own set of guidelines: GHS Standard Mode. GHS Standard Mode is based on our long history of successfully deployed software and on our collaboration with customers who have achieved the same high level of reliability. We use GHS Standard Mode internally to develop our own tools.

Find bugs automatically

DoubleCheck, Green Hills Software's integrated static analyzer, allows you to identify programming errors even before running your program and find bugs that may never show up during regular testing. Unlike traditional static analysis tools that run separately from the compiler, DoubleCheck is built in to our compiler, which results in these benefits:

  • setup is trivial—you just need to turn on a switch
  • it automatically runs with every build if left on
  • the code checked is the actual code being compiled

Run-time error checking complements DoubleCheck by finding bugs that cannot be identified by static analysis alone. Especially onerous bugs may remain hidden for a long time before failure. With run-time error checking, you're alerted to the cause of the problem when it happens. Eliminating a bug is often trivial when you're looking directly at it.

Lower production cost

Reduce your processor costs

You don't always need a faster processor to meet increasing performance requirements. Our superior compiler optimizations can be tuned to get the most out of whatever chip you use. How much money would you save if you could use a lower-cost processor to meet the same real-time requirements? Or if you could release a new product without having to produce a new hardware platform to run it on? Not only will improving your application's performance save you money on the processor itself, lower-cost processors operate at lower clock rates and require less power and cooling. Longer battery life makes your product better and cheaper at the same time.

Reduce your memory costs

Green Hills Compiler optimizations reduce your memory costs by reducing the size of your executable. Most programs see at least 10% improvement relative to the GNU Compiler.

Maximize savings

Our team of cost reduction experts can help you to reduce your memory and processor requirements without sacrificing features. We have reduced customer memory usage by over 30% and have improved performance by over 300%.

Green Hills optimizing compilers enable you to reduce your processor costs With Green HIlls optimizing compilers, you can meet real-time requirements with lower cost hardware by tuning our compiler optimizations to get the most from your hardware.