There are quite a few IDE available for ARM, which one's good?
What's your experience with anyone of them?
anymore?
Most ARM projects I've worked on have been "custom makefile" sort of environments, so I don't know much about IDEs. Of course, the most important part of any system is the debugger. Depending on your chip vendor the best choice may vary. I've had a lot of luck with ARM's in-house tools (RealView Development Suite), but for some more-finicky parts, I've had better luck with Lauterbach's Trace32 software.
I hate IDEs and just use an editor and command line tools. gcc based is going to have a lot more support as far as experienced users and web pages with good info. Kiel is now ARM so they likely have the ARM compiler which is far superior to gcc in the code it produces.
Until code sourcery I built all of my own gcc cross compilers. Originally because code sourcery was the first gcc to support thumb2. And because it is easier to just use their tools instead of keep building your own, they are just easy to install and use. Emdebian is another one that is one you can just get the tools from and not have to build your own. Codesourcery lite is better than embdebian though, easier to install and maintain.
I have used the Keil and IAR demo tools with things like the stellaris eval boards and found both to be insanely painful. But I find most IDEs to be insanely painful so maybe that doesnt help you. Quite a few micros are going to give you both a KeiL eval and an IAR so you can shop around a bit and download a few eval copies to try the two of them out.
Keil is arm so you are going to get the best arm support there is, and the binaries will be hard to beat for size and performance (once you learn the tools). Codesourcery is doing things other than arm, but I consider them to be the standard in gcc tools right now, easiest to install, work the best, keep up with if not lead gcc and binutils. With codesourcery you can take advantage of the vast majority of examples in the world. Something you wont be able to do with Keil/ARM.
I like the IAR development tools, although I tend to use my own favourite editor and use their IDE for building and debugging. One strong point for me is that they support a wide range of processors so I have not had to learn a new debug environment when moving between devices. I have used the MSP430, ARM and AVR32 variants of the IAR tools with almost no problems moving between the different devices. (incidentally, in my applications the AVR32 knocks spots off the ARM Cortex devices. Its low power operation is way superior and it can do things that until the new Energy micro devices appear, ARM simply cannot do)
Another good, multi-architecture IDE is available from Rowley Associates. Their support is excellent. It is GCC based but with their own C and tasking libraries.
We use the Keil uVision/MDKARM toolchain. The compiler is excellent and the debugging tools are among the best I've ever used (very good means of accessing and monitoring peripheral registers etc). The peripheral tools don't fully support the STM32 connectivity line devices yet, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon.
The editor is appalling, but then most in-IDE editors are (with a few exceptions), so I just use an external editor and use the IDE for compiling/debugging.
I don't really understand what the situation is with Keil though - I believe they're part of ARM, but they have the uVision IDE whereas ARM have the RealView Development Suite, which is built on Eclipse (so will have a decent editor). I've not used the RVDS, but if I believe it uses the same compiler as Keil uVision, so if it's got the debugging tools of uVision combined with the editing tools of Eclipse, it should be an awesome IDE.
I've used the Keil toolset extensively, the compiler & debugger are very solid & easy to use. Keil support is slow & lazy from my experience, however.
Regarding ARM's RVDS -- I've used tools from ARM for a long time (since SDT v2.11 in the mid-90s), but I personally consider ARM's Eclipse-based RVDS a disaster. The compiler (and assembler & linker & libs) are all very good, naturally, but RVDS is really painful to work with. Eclipse crashes, poor tool integration, the debugger is clumsy, etc... Very good support, and very expensive (relative to other choices).
IAR is solid all around. Good clean IDE, code generation is very tight, support is excellent, debugger works very well and almost every CM3 eval board on the planet is supported (directly or indirectly) by IAR.
There are many other choices as well. Can I point you towards 2 of them, both GNU/GCC based?
Rowley Crossworks for ARM - I've used this for quite a while, and the tools are excellent, affordable, and the support is simply unmatched. You didn't specify if your needs are personal or professional, but Rowley has a very affordable personal license which gives you all the features & support of the professional suite, it just restricts your usage (no commercial development)
Miro Samek's Quantum Leaps has a Free Open Source toolset for ARM which works under Windows (without Cygwin - native gcc cross compiler). I haven't used it yet but I just received an email about it a couple days ago.
Good luck!
Selection Guide of Low Cost Tools for Cortex-M3 http://dev.emcelettronica.com/selection-guide-low-cost-tools-cortex-m3
Someone answered me in a different Q
When it comes to free and open source software (FOSS) tools for ARM, a typical user is best served by a ready-to-use, pre-packaged toolset, as you don't want to waste time on building your tools. Good packages include not just the GNU compiler and linker, but also the startup code, standard library, linker scripts, and of course, debugger support (which traditionally has been the Achilles' heel of the FOSS tools).
One excellent FOSS toolset for ARM7/9/11/Cortex not mentioned in any previous posts is the devkitPro project on SourceForge.net. The devkitARM component of the devktiPro project provides one of the best GNU-ARM toolsets on the market. The devkitARM package contains the latest GCC, GDB, libraries, and binutils for ARM-EABI (bare-metal). The devkitPro project has an excellent track record of keeping the toolset current with the latest version of the GCC compiler suite and the GDB debugger. For debugging, devkitPro offers the Insight GDB frontend, which again is the best Insight distro available. To round up the development suite, you will also need GNU-make and some UNIX-style file utilities commonly used in Makefiles. The collection of links to all these tools is available at state-machine.com/arm.
Perhaps I should note that all these tools run natively on Windows, without Cygwin or other extra DLLs.
To get up to speed quickly you need well documented example projects. Some of such complete projects are available from state-machine.com/arm. Among others, you'll find examples C++ projects (with the right startup code and linker scripts for calling static constructors) as well as reducing the overhead of C++ to make it suitable for small MCUs.
Finally, I'd like to mention my article "Building Bare Metal ARM Systems with GNU", which describes in detail how to use the GNU toolchain to build real-life embedded systems based on ARM7/ARM9 microcontrollers. This big, 10-part article has been originally published on Embedded.com.
I use Eclipse as the IDE with Code Sourcery as the toolchain and Subclipse for Subversion integration. It works great for me!