I am not sure when exactly Intel decided to add a free commercial license to their System Studio 2018 suite of developer tools, but it was circling around Twitter just before GDC. InfoWorld has a brief mention of the license back in late December, though.

Regardless, Intel now allows developers to download and install many of their development tools, including VTune, Inspector, and the Intel C++ Compiler… for free (even for commercial applications). The catch? You will need to renew your license (again, for free) every 90 days, albeit an unlimited number of times. You will also need to rely upon the community for support… of course. It’s free.

If you’re developing applications, VTune is a very good profiler tool. Beyond the typical timeline and function call graph, it also rates your application based on its multi-core and wait time (ex: spinlock) performance. Inspector, on the other hand, is basically Intel’s version of Valgrind. If you are planning on being a Windows-only development studio, then you don’t really have many other tools for detecting memory leaks (apart from using good containers… … …). It even goes into OpenCL-based profiling.

Intel System Studio 2018 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.