Sun, though, would not comment on what might mean for the product, called Sun Studio 12 Update 1, thus leaving its fate up in the air similar to other Sun technologies.

Built for programmers developing applications in C, C++, and Fortran, Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is "focused on really unleashing application performance on multicore processors as well as simplifying parallel development on those processors," said Dan Roberts, director of product management for the data center software group at Sun.

But Roberts, asked what the impending purchase of Sun might mean for the tool, instead deferred to . Sun on that page said Solaris has been the leading OS for the Oracle database. But no specific statement pertaining to Sun Studio could be found. An Oracle representative, when asked about the fate of the product, merely responded that the transaction had not closed yet.

Sun Studio is commonly used for building transactional applications as well as telecommunications, government, and military applications. It also is being used in retail and manufacturing application realms. The package consists of tools such as parallelizing compilers, debuggers, and libraries.