Hello group,
I'd like to hear some opinions regarding the Rowley CrossWorks for ARM toolchain. I know, this is a somewhat broad request, so I'll try to clarify things a bit more:
I am in the process of evaluating ARM toolchains which are to be used in university classes/projects.
Wishlist 1. stable, proven toolchain 2. preferably something "industry standard", so students use the tools which they might encounter in their future jobs 3. Cheap :)
We just recently switched to ARM. We have experience with the (X)C166 architecture using the Tasking Toolchain and Atmel AVR with WinAVR (GCC)
So far I tried out the the following ARM toolchains
IAR: Had no problems with this one. I've come to the understandung, that this is THE toolchain for ARM Development? So certainly this fits 1 and 2 of the wishlist, but not exactly 3 ...
WinARM (free GCC) I tried this and it worked somehow but feels a bit "hacky". AVRGCC distributions in contrast are way more polished. So for the time being I ruled this one out
ImageCraft This worked pretty good, but as far as I could see there's no debugger included, which is a minus. Worse, the website, well, is very unprofessional and looks and reads as if it was created by a bunch of immature teenagers. I think I'll stay away from this. (I looked at
Rowley Crossworks No Problems. Quite like IAR. Looks nice. I was quite impressed, and prices are very reasonable. From what I've seen this is a GCC variant for which Rowley provides the standard libs, device headers, IDE, etc?
Tasking We already use this product for (X)C166. For ARM we want something else.
Keil Haven't tried this one so far. Also quite welll known, at least for 8051 I think.
So basically we're asking ourselves whether IAR or Rowley (and perhaps Keil?) is the "better" solution for us. "Everyone" seems to know IAR or Keil, while I haven't found that much about Rowley.
Any personal opinions regarding Rowley/IAR/Keil or pointers to Reviews/Benchmarks are greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading this far :)
Sebastian Schildt