SEGGER Embedded Studio V5 reduces code size

SEGGER’s Embedded Studio V5 for Arm processors has been unveiled and comes with the company’s Compiler, Linker, Runtime and Floating-Point libraries included.

All components are designed from the ground up for use in embedded systems and work to help generate extremely small programs.

A program which blinks an LED – a ‘blinky’ – on a typical Cortex-M microcontroller unit can be written in C or C++, with a total size of less than 100bytes. Terminal output (printf) can be done in real time using RTT, SWO or semi-hosting with host-side formatting, keeping the standard ‘Hello World’ program to no more than a few hundred bytes.

As with SEGGER’s SystemView and Ozone platforms, the Embedded Studio can be used on Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems – in keeping with the company’s cross-platform philosophy.

“This new version of Embedded Studio is ground-breaking. I have never seen a toolchain that produces such small programs, especially out-of-the-box, created by the project generator. Our compiler uses Clang with a new code generator developed directly by the SEGGER software engineering team. In balanced optimization mode, it produces code that is as small as it is fast. Our linker, start-up code, runtime library and debugger are all tuned to get the most out of a microcontroller,” said Rolf Segger, founder of SEGGER. “Version 5 outperforms even my own expectations.”

Embedded Studio can be downloaded without registration and used free of charge for educational and non-commercial purposes, as well as evaluated (without code size, feature, or time limit) on all platforms.