ARM Cortex-M compiler differences

Question

I\'m about to develop some firmwares for Cortex-M cores on STM32 processors using C for my projects, and searching on the web I\'ve found a lot of different compilers: Keil,

Answer 1

Performance should not be your first concern unless when it becomes so in a production environment. The reason is that first, most ARM compilers are plenty good enough, and really you are down to GCC based, Keil, and IAR. Second, most ARM MCU are "blazingly fast" and have "so much memory" (these are comparing to 8-bit MCU like AVR/PIC but also to older PC). A decent Cortex-M4 MCU runs up to 100MHz and has 256K of flash. Again, to put it in perspective, that's more memory and 10x faster clock rate than the original Macintosh etc. We went to the Moon with much less ;-)

Now the performance of the tools itself, in particular, the IDE and the debuggers, differ greatly. For example, the popular Eclipse is written in Java, might be a bit sluggish to slower or memory-starved PCs. The best thing to do is to install GCC+Eclipse, and the vendors' demos and see for yourself.