RealView Development Suite (RVDS) is the successor to the ARM Developer Suite (ADS). The code-generation tools which come as part of RVDS 3.0 are called the RealView Compilation Tools (RVCT). There have been many enhancements to ARM's code generation tools since ADS 1.2. The major changes in RVCT 3.0 include:
Full support for all latest ARM processors, including ARMv6 and ARMv7
Full ISO C++ Support by way of the EDG (Edison Design Group) front-end including exceptions, namespaces, templates and intelligent implementation of Run-Time Type Information (RTTI)
Improved code size and performance of compiled code
Typically 10% performance improvement for ARM-state code
(compiled with armcc --arm -O2 -Otime --cpu ARM9E)
Typically 5% code size reduction for Thumb-state code
(compiled with armcc --thumb -O2 -Ospace --cpu ARM9E)
New optimization switch -O3 for even better code performance
Compliant with the ARM ABI that allows for interoperation of binary objects from different toolchains such as GCC
ARM and Thumb compilation per-function (using "#pragma arm" and "#pragma thumb")
Five floating-point models (selected with "--fpmode")
New Embedded Assembler and re-engineered Inline Assembler
Support for building Linux applications (see Application Note 150)
Compatibility with legacy libraries built with ADS by way of --apcs /adsabi, but RVDS 3.0 will be the last toolkit to support this
Support for some GNU extensions, with the --gnu option
Partial C99 language support, including "restrict"
New compiler intrinsics can replace some inline assembler
Unicode and Wide-character support in wchar.h
DWARF3 debug tables support by default
Multi-file compilation for optimisation across several related C files
New "Unified Assembler Language" (UAL) simplifies migration from ARM & Thumb to Thumb-2
RW data compression and Linker feedback to further reduce ROM size
Preliminary support for the Eclipse environment.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean language support for displaying error and warning messages with the --message_locale option.