reliable & user friendly toolchain for Cortex-M development

[nick58]

Hello,
I know the topic nowadays is perhaps not so painful, considering many IDEs being Eclipse based and big companies pushing code generation tools. But is it still IAR vs KEIL and is it only commercial tools area for professional work? For instance, in my job I care not so much for efficient code generation or greatest speed of execution, but rather reliability and convenience for use. I.e. which tool do you think is least probable to bring problems due to bad generated code and which tool gives highest overall productivity. We are talking small deeply embedded applications, high reliability, often soft-real time, with small and simple RTOS (such as RTX, FreeRTOS, etc) or often even without RTOS.

Thanks for sharing!

[iot]

At work I use IAR and Rowley Crossworks.

About IAR is a very good compiler but expensive a lot!! Near to 7K USD without plugins.

Rowley is a very good tool, it doesn't require a lot of resources, it is a very well integrated environment, it is cheaper than IAR. You can buy a license per developer, it allows a single developer to install in multiple machines. For hobbyist is only 100 USD.

[digitalmg]

I think the best free development  tools for ARM is CooCox.   www.coocox.org

[pablo2048]

I personally prefer emBlocks (actually i went from eclipse based IDE - CooCox, Eclipse native into this). It's based on CodeBlocks so it's small and fast...

[hate]

I personally prefer emBlocks (actually i went from eclipse based IDE - CooCox, Eclipse native into this). It's based on CodeBlocks so it's small and fast...

For a matter of fact CodeBlocks can be used for ARM development too.

[nick58]

Thank you for sharing guys! How do you think open source solutions compare to the commercial ones in terms of reliability?

[hate]

Comparing open source and commercial IDEs may result in differences between performance and usability but more important than that it is the compilers that need to be compared. Usually commercial compilers should outperform their open source equivalents but companies like ARM, Atmel support and maintain a gcc port for their microcontrollers which should be taken seriously in term of code size and speed.

[bluex]

In cooperation with STMicroelectronics, ARM offers the fully-featured Keil MDK for STM32F0 and STM32L0 devices that is free of charge for end users.

You can find and download it from here:

http://www2.keil.com/stmicroelectronics-stm32

[bobcat1]

Hi All

I think IAR & Keil are the best compiler & IDE for developing code for ARM product although they are expensive platform they worth the price cost

All the best

Bobi

[bluex]

Even if you don't use Keil compiler, you can still install full demo version of keil, and configure the IDE to use the GCC GNU tools. This way, you use the free gcc provided by arm, and you have all the benefits of the keil IDE (and more important) and debugger and simulator. If you have a JLink (I have official one) it works better than GCC with Eclipse.

[nick58]

Recently I've been using some recent version of uVision and from time to time it crashes while I switch between different views during debugging, tracing, etc. So how do you compare KEIL uVision and IAR EW on their stability?

[GroundPlaneLoop]

Knows anybody this tool?

http://www.ac6-tools.com/

[Elmer]

+1 vote for Keil from a simplicity POV. I started my ARM venture with gcc toolchains which I found a real hassle, and with Keil I had a compiled and working STM32F1 "Hello world" in a matter of minutes. Then again, figuring out new compiler toolchains was never my favorite hobby.

[dotm]

If it werent for the horrible code editor, I'd say Keil.
For me it is still Keil with eclipse as editor and git frontend.
Take a look at DS5 as well. It now includes cortex-m and is eclipse-based.

[Buddy]

Does DS5 have those filesystem libraries like Keil has? Does DS5 support stm32 M4 cortex?

[LzEn]

If it werent for the horrible code editor, I'd say Keil.
For me it is still Keil with eclipse as editor and git frontend.
Take a look at DS5 as well. It now includes cortex-m and is eclipse-based.

I agree completely about Keil, I then moved to eclipse cdt. I like the small feature the text editor has like hover over a macro or function and it will show more details. Or the background highlight depending on macro definitions (#if defined XXX). Also the EGit plugin is nice.

I used IAR for 8051, I never really liked it. I am not sure if the ARM one is any different. I would still recommend Eclipse CDT with GNU.

Now I will go and check DS5.

[hate]

For those that fancy the Keil compiler, Codeblocks can be configured for it and you can use all the editor features of CB. I don't think Keil's debugger will work inside CB though unless it resembles gdb.

[iot]

I recently discovered "Embedded Studio" from SEGGER. It is a re-branded Rowley Crossworks, it has free and paid edition. It is a very interesting option.

[baybay]

I am using;

Eclipse (with GNU ARM Eclipse plugin) + GCC ( https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded ) + OpenOCD + GNU Utils (make e.t.c)

This combination is very good solution. reliable & user friendly & free ...

[LzEn]

This might be a restricted solution, but if you use a TI MCU I would highly recommend TI Code Composer Studio + TI RTOS.
The IDE/compiler is free and based on eclipse, and the RTOS IMHO is great and free. A lot of examples and driver files are available. I tried it on both Windows and Ubuntu without any problems.
They also have a video workshop so you can learn more about the TI-RTOS details.
But as I said you need to restrict yourself to TI MCU line.

[nPn]

I am using;

Eclipse (with GNU ARM Eclipse plugin) + GCC ( https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded ) + OpenOCD + GNU Utils (make e.t.c)

This combination is very good solution. reliable & user friendly & free ...

This is what we use at work for all CMx projects. We found that the commercial compilers were based on GCC anyways and while they can generate faster/smaller code with their comprehensive peephole optimizations, their C++ language compatibility and code generation bugfixes lagged behind the main open source tree that is trying to compete with LLVM on reliability and features.