Opinions on Rowley CrossWorks for ARM

In article , Sebastian Schildt writes

There is some one around there who has a sig that says "pick any two from three... " :-)

Whilst Rowley is cheap you should also ask the other commercial compiler vendors as most will do special deals for education that are way below their normal prices. eg IAR, Keil, etc

Industry standard, stable, proven tool-chain would be IAR, Keil GHS (or even ADS)

There are also a lot of versions of Gcc and various libraries out there. Some better than others.

CrossWorks for ARM, for example, uses the Gnu toolchain.

The Gnu toolchain for ARM is definitely production quality. I've been shipping product using the Gnu toolchain for ARM (and other platforms) for many years, and I've got no complaints.

Crossworks seems fairly popular among the MSP430 crowd, and everybody has nice things to say about them. I'm not really a GUI type myself, but in my book, Crossworks gets a lot of points for

If I was going to buy development tools, Crossworks is probably whom I'd call first.

IFF you are on Linux, the best, cheapest solution I have used so far is "buildroot" (use google). Everything is free, it stays current until you freeze a version (which in school is never). It uses the gnu toolchain. It is best if you are using a supported BSP from linux.

IFF you are not on Linux, shame on continuing the mis-education of students. Throwing cygwin on Winxp is doing the worst of both worlds, but I have heard that that works too.

Regards, Steve

I haven't used ARMs at all, but I've used ImageCraft compilers for the avr, and have colleagues that use it for the msp430. Judging from that experience, I think you'd be foolish not to include them in your testing and evaluation. The strong points of ImageCraft compilers are ease of use, excellent support (both by the guys that wrote the compiler, and a strong community - try getting through to one of IAR's software developers!), and value for money (including being very flexible and helpful regarding licensing). I assume that the same points apply to their ARM compiler.

In my experience IARs support is good but Rowley's is absolutely first-class and they really do bend over backwards to help. However, you do get paper manuals with IAR which I always like but that might not be all that useful to a room full of students.

I believe I read on the Rowley website that there is an educational discount but Chris also mentioned that IAR can do that so I don't know how the prices will compare once you explore both roads. I do prefer the IAR IDE - their auto indentation is great and it does integrate with tools like Lint better. On my project the code generated by the IAR compiler was slightly smaller but no quicker than that generated by Rowley's gcc.

I understand they are almost ready to release one.

I agree that it could use some work, but this is NOT a reflection on the quality of their toolset, or their commitment to tech support. They're really a nice and responsive company.

You could also look at Code Sourcery, which is another gcc option. And James Lynch has a nice tutorial on using Eclipse with the Arm GNU Toolset.

Make sure you factor in the currency conversion rate of any tools not bought in your own country. UK tools cost around twice the pound rate in US currency, depending on whatever exchange rate is in effect at the time. So 500 pounds can equate to almost $1000 (probably a bit less).

Eric

We find Microcross Visual X-Tools to work much better than the Rowley tools. It is also based on gnu/gcc. We have used it on a number of ARM and Coldfire projects.

We found the Rowley debugger to be just awful. It was buggy and locked up the PC repeatedly. The only recovery was a reboot. I believe it is still the current version. It was only a few months ago that we used it.

The Microcross implementation is much more stable. We have used it with both Multi-Ice and Abatron JTAG emulators.

Scott

DISCLAIMER: In all fairness I must say that we are a Microcross partner. That said, I stand by my above comments.

Hi

We're using the Rowley one in the early stage of a project and, so far, it seems great. Haven't had any troubles with the debugger. The docs on the tasking library are a bit brief in places but the source is provided so its not hard to fill in the gaps. Their support has been excellent, even when we've asked stupid questions.

regards Peter

Hallo,

I have worked with Keil, GCC + GDB/Insight and Rowley Crossworks for ARM and have to say that I liked their toolchain best. In my opinion one of the strongest points for Rowley Crossworks are:

• They support the ARM Wiggler Interfaces which is very cheap and it works excellent (Compared to using GDB/INSIGHT with ocddaemon or openocd). This might be interesting because cost is usually an issue for university classes. * The Debugger is an excellent peace of work. We switched from another toolchain and I found that debugging time cut down a big junk with the Rowley Tools. * They use the GNU C/C++ compiler tools which are somewhat "industry standard" tools. Specially the good integration for inline assembler in GCC is a big plus for embedded systems if you are doing low level stuff. * Works on Linux * They have the best cost/performance ration in my opinion.

Some drawbacks on Rowley are:

• They introduced another concept of linker script bases on XML stuff. It is somewhat complicated and internally generated GNU LD scripts. I have never understood why they did this.
• There Code Editor is not the best. It does not support completion or folding or other neat stuff.
• They use their own project files instead of something like Make. Although they support exporting something like a Build/ script.
• They support only a very small range of platforms in contrast to IAR or others. Having more than one toolchain might be an issue.

Kind Regards, Christian Walter

Thank you all for input so far.

Sebastian Schildt

I've never had any problems with the debugger, and have never heard of anyone else having problems. I'm sure that any bugs would have been mentioned on the LPC2000 Yahoo group, as there are quite a lot of CrossWorks users there.

Did you report the problems to Rowley and what was their response?

Leon

This is contrary to my observations. I have had the debugger crash on rare occasions, and I have found that setting a breakpoint while the code is running on the target sometimes causes a dabort exception (if I break first, set the bp, then continue, there's no issue). I have never had the PC lock up or bluescreen.

I find the project management to be excellent; the granularity for changing options at either the project or file level is a godsend. The fact that all configurations are in XML files lets me manage tool configurations with my version control system, a task that is impossible with another IDE I use that insists on a binary format.

--Gene

Oh good, it's not just me then. I noticed this has begun happening a bit more frequently since I went up to the latest versions (1.6) but it did happen once in a while on 1.5. Also, very occasionally, if I set a breakpoint on an if statement then I can't remove it - although the debugger says that it is gone I still stop whenever the if is considered.

Version control. Errm yeah, I should probably get me some of that....

"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@iris.uk.clara.net...

We now offer a Personal License for hobbyists and students at $149 rather than $950 for the Commercial License. Educational Licenses are for universitiy and research use. We're always very flexible and have donated licenses and hardware to many, many people. Donating software and hardware to startups (there is a "merit" criterion) with a promise that they'll purchase a commercial license and hardware at a later date once their product is minting it for them is not uncommon.

It's better to do one thing very well than lots of things that are mediocre or, worse, pathetic.

-- Paul.

That's a good idea. Presumably it's the full package and their are no code size limits imposed?

I can do one thing mediocre and lots of things pathetically :-(

In article , Sebastian Schildt writes

It is one of the main ARM compilers used in Industry fro both C and C++ They can be inexpensive for universities. Talk to them

This now has the ARM RealView compiler in it. Again talk to them about deals for Universities.

Both Keil and IAR are Industry standard, very reliable and well supported. They both do some very good deals for universities when asked. You won't go wrong with either of these for ARM

Your students will come across both in industry and ARM the company work closely with both.

There is inexpensive and there is cheap.... You do not want to cut things too find. Industry stopped using wigglers some time back.

In Industry time is money. So the cheapest option for hobby use is not the same as the best option for industry.

Hardly I would not recommend GCC for embedded use.

And this is an advantage?

When I worked for Racal on a large military project a few years ago, the expensive 68000 compiler that the software engineers were supposed to use was so full of bugs that they gave up on it and used gcc. The managers were horrified when they found out, but the software had already been written and worked.

Leon