On this page we publish a benchmark concerning the ARM C Compiler for the STR7 (ST ARM7) family. We have tried to make them as objective as possible.

The purpose of this benchmark is to evaluate the GNU C Compiler in comparison to other commonly used C compilers for ARM7TDMI.

A number of ARM development tool providers base their offer on the GNU C Compiler, even though this tool set has not been developed specifically for designers of low and medium complexity embedded systems such as those that run on ARM7TDMI core-based microcontrollers.

This begs the question - is a compiler adapted to developing applications that run under complex file management systems, equally adapted to developing microcontroller applications? To respond to this question, this benchmark tests the GNU C Compiler against other C Compilers that have been developed around embedded system design to see how the GNU output measures up in terms of code size and speed of execution.

The results show that the GNU C Compiler performs very well against the other tested compilers, and in many cases it out performs its competitors. In addition, the results illustrate how the GNU function libraries (specifically printf) can constitute a handicap in embedded system design, as they are not specifically adapted to the requirements of low and medium complexity embedded systems.
However, these test also show how this handicap can be overcome with relative ease with the use of simplified function libraries.

You can download the results (124 Kb) by clicking on the button below: