ARM Workbench IDE

Previous versions of RVDS included the CodeWarrior IDE which was functional but only worked on Windows and did not include debugger integration. A separate debugger, RealView Debugger was attached. For a while this included its own project manager and code editor.

In RVDS 4, these functions been dropped in favour of an industry-standard Eclipse-based IDE. With integrated support for code editing, project management, debugging and profiling, this provides programmers with a highly productive and extensible environment for ARM development.

The ARM Workbench IDE is based on Eclipse 3.3. By integrating this IDE with ARM's leading compilation tools and profiler, ARM has provided the best available code size/performance result, with a painless and productive interface.

Main IDE Features

Eclipse_small

For those unfamiliar with Eclipse, it provides an extremely powerful development environment where common functions are available through menus and toolbars. A common feature is understanding of code to a level allowing navigation aids such as function lists and variable indices.

Key features of the Workbench IDE are:

Syntax highlighting for C, C++ and ARM assembler
Full online help system with access to comprehensive documentation
Integrated Flash programmer to permit automated programming of flash devices as part of program download
Integrated profiler operation allowing access to execution statistics and other features from within the IDE
Graphical link memory map editor to show how code is distributed in the final memory map
Configuration dialogs for the compiler, linker and utilities, providing easy access to common options the vast array of features and tweaks available
Easy New Project Wizard sets up an ARM project ready for compilation and execution
Easy import of CodeWarrior projects, e.g. from previous RVDS revisions